I’m nearing the end of my senior year, and honestly, I’m glad. This school year’s been quite a wild ride. As the weather begins to warm and students start to run for the finish line waiting for them mid-June, the seniors start slumping. It’s natural, of course, for every senior to relax just a little. No one is writing any more supplemental essays and filling out The Common Application. No one is worried about sending his or her first-semester grades to colleges. You’d probably expect all of the seniors to be relaxed and Hakuna Matata-ing into the sunset, but they’re not. If I’ve noticed anything this year, it’s that everyone needs to take a break from the same school system and social interactions he or she has cycled through for 18 years. Everyone’s understandably restless.
So what happens when you have a bunch of restless seniors sitting in classrooms and wandering the hallways with little regard toward what they’re learning? Any teacher can tell you this is where the school year becomes the most frustrating because it’s so much harder to keep a lid on the antics. Not that they can be blamed for wanting some fun; they’ve been stuck in the same loop for four years and are just now seeing the end of it. I don’t think that every kid should descend into anarchy, but I do think that it’s perfectly acceptable for everyone to take a step back and try to enjoy the rest of senior year. Give yourself some more free time to have fun, but don’t forget to keep your grades up — you don’t want to get rescinded for avoidable mistakes.
But as I said, the teachers are obviously frustrated with us and wish we would behave, so how does our high school and every high school in the area fix this problem? We send the kids off onto internships to occupy their time. This way they stay out of trouble and occupy their time doing something remotely worthwhile rather than just not going to school. It’s quite the idea, actually, because not only do we finally get to get rid of the monotony of the rotating schedule that we’ve been subject to for four years, but we also get to try to experiment with a field that we’re interested in. If you like fashion and design, you can work for an interior design business. If you’re passionate about taking pictures or the quality of your Instagram, there are bound to be photography studios that are looking for dedicated high schoolers willing to help their business. The internship project both gets the rowdy seniors as far away from the school as possible and guides them to find a field where they might have an interest.
I have a message to my fellow seniors (or to their parents, in which case please pass this along): try to find work in something that you actually find engaging. I know it’s fun to find internships with your friends that don’t require a lot of work, but this is a great opportunity to get some real-world experience before you get to college and find yourself looking for a very serious internship. Life’s all about making connections and getting your name out there. It’s very unlikely that you’ll get lauded for your work during your senior internship, but if you use this opportunity to work hard, you might just learn something that’ll help you in a few years.
Daniel Glynn is a senior at Wilton High School. He shares this column with four classmates.
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