Senior Interview Video

Make sure to check out the video (link above) and the podcast, wherever you listen to yours about other insights on experiences of struggles after high school. 

You walk across the stage looking into the crowd of the thousands of people and see your family ecstatic, excited to see you get this far. You look down as you walk, seeing your gown and feeling the tassel on the side of your head. You look up as you approach them handing you your diploma as they call your name, finished by a handshake and a descent off the stage. And just like that it’s over, one of the biggest moments they talk about occurring in your life. All the time that led up to this moment, and all the times to follow.

Despite the journey to get to this point however, most seniors will agree to the fact that their “senioritis”, a supposed affliction of students in their final year of high school or college, characterized by a decline in motivation or performance, was their hardest year of trying to finish out high school for a variety of reasons. 

Some seniors are stressed about their community service hours, and are scrambling to get those done in order to graduate. Other seniors have a hard time with applying to colleges and finding somewhere that they want to continue their schooling at while other seniors have no idea what life after high school looks like for them. 95% of seniors claim that they don’t know what to do after high school, while another 25% have their parents already have picked out what they will be doing after high school. A lot of students do figure out where they want to go, but don’t know what career they want to go into. While lots of students struggle with decisions in general, some others have it figured out and struggle with getting money, their FAFSA, or even scholarships. 

One major change that occurs after graduation is the friendships and relationships students have made throughout their 4-year journey in high school. Graduation is the time in people’s lives when they can choose whether or not to make a big change for themselves. With this hardship involves significant changes in relationships with friends. The first steps into adulthood bring the best opportunity to make a difference in one’s life. A common action new graduates would make is moving away somewhere new, either for education, a job, or just to discover themselves. This apparent change is the physical distance between friends. Physical separation can make it challenging to maintain the same level of contact as before. Even with technology today that enables people to stay connected, it's not the same as seeing someone in person. This would alter the connections friends have and eventually separate them.

Along with the struggle of losing relationships with those you had built over the last few years, seniors also struggle with more responsibilities, as they are forced to mature into an adult with lots of new things to take care of in their lives that they’ve never had to before. Seniors also not only deal with losing their friends as a change, but lots of other changes and forming a new routine when it comes to their new college, work, or whatever their life looks like “schedule”. It will cause them to improve their time management, and they will have to be more accountable for their responsibilities, as no one will be there to tell them where to be, when to be there, and why to do it. With these new responsibilities, they also have the freedom to choose to do something when they want to or if they don’t want to do it at all. As time passes on, seniors will also learn to deal with the new amounts of work as it intensifies and varies among what they decide to do.