By HARRISON HILL
Staff Writer

This year’s seniors, including myself, will be graduating in less than two weeks, and the entire class will enter the next phase of life. Students will be moving to colleges around the country come fall, others committing to different military branches, and some taking time to explore what this post-high school life has in store. We entered high school during a divisive election year and are now leaving it in another chaotic year. With the coronavirus raging on, many seniors feel as though their senior year was taken from them and cut months short, losing memories such as prom, senior night, and graduation. Although this isn’t the final chapter we had all hoped for, our high school career was still filled with memory after memory, including dances that had us sweating from spending the entire night moshing, rivalry football games against Woodbridge that had us crossing our fingers, and pep rallies that had us screaming “four more years.”

In 2016, we entered high school as young freshmen, when our football team went 7-3 and the 2016 election was in full swing. We experienced our first Friday night lights, our first dances, and took our first real finals as we learned what high school really was.

We quickly transitioned from freshman year to sophomore year as we started to get the hang of high school and learn all the survival hacks, whether it be how to survive AP testing or how to find the best lunch spot.

“The chicken from Albertsons was the best thing to have for lunch. If I didn’t have it the day wasn’t anything near complete,” senior Noah Nejad said.

Then we moved from sophomore year to junior year and school work doubled — or, for some, tripled. As juniors, many of us went to our first ever prom while also studying for the SAT or ACT. We planned for what college we would eventually attend. Junior year taught us the value of hard work and shaped us for our final year of high school. 

Finally, after three years of blood, sweat, and tears, we then became seniors. We got to be the alphas on campus and indulge in traditions, such as waking up early for Senior Sunrise, going to Knott’s Berry Farm for Senior Ditch Day, and parking in the senior lot. We danced at our final homecoming at AV Irvine and winter formal by the beach, making memories with our friends as we took more time to appreciate the activities we took for granted over the past four years. We anxiously applied to college, reloading our emails every ten minutes in anticipation for our decisions, and most of us have now committed to the next four years of our lives. Prom and the celebratory end of four years of high school was only months away when it suddenly stopped. What was once supposed to be for three weeks turned into a month, and then until the end of the year, leaving us to manage a digital education and say goodbye to the end of our high school career.

Although our senior year didn’t end anything like we would have wanted or anticipated in a million years, ultimately we can still look forward to the great things that life has waiting for each of us. We had a great and memorable four years of high school that helped develop us in some way for the rest of our life. If I could give any advice to the underclassmen navigating the crazy world that is high school, it would be to not take any opportunity you are given during these four years for granted, because it goes by in the blink of an eye.