Senior Year by Andrea

Senior Year by Andrea - August 2022 Scholarship Essay

As all seniors, I have a simple goal for my upcoming senior year: graduating. My high school experience wasn’t common. I had half of my freshman year taken away from me due to the entry of Covid-19. My sophomore year was all online. My junior year was in person, but covid restrictions didn’t make it feel like a regular school year. Now it’s my last year in high school and I want to take advantage of it. After all, senior year is the most important year where I will be determining the first steps to my career.

Ever since sophomore year, I was a straight A student with a 4.0 GPA. I have no doubt that I can do the same this year. The only thing that is making me doubt myself a bit is the challenge class I decided to take on: AP Literature. As of now, I am on track to graduate. In fact, I only need to pass my History class and my English class. The AP Lit teacher who’s straight-forward came to admit that this class is NOT easy. I guess what terrifies me the most is that the previous seniors told me how stressful and difficult the class was. I didn’t believe them until I looked at the statistics. Turns out, 63% of the seniors that took the class failed. So basically more than half of the class. Nobody ended that class with an “A”, frankly the only girl that passed the class with a “B” was a girl who got into the precious Ivy League school, Stanford, which sets the bar pretty high.

I won’t lie, I dropped the class after my first day. But after thinking about it some more, I decided to switch back into it. I understand that with senior year comes college applications and other important stuff, but I’m a person who loves to challenge herself. I like to think that if I don’t challenge myself, then I won’t improve as a scholar in any way. Just like how failing isn’t a bad thing to me, I just see it as a necessary experience through the process of learning. Yeah, failing is never a good feeling. But sometimes we don’t realize how important it is to make mistakes.

I know that my senior year won’t always be good. There will be times where I will feel stressed, sleep-deprived, and maybe even my mental-health will decline. But as long as I remain determined and keep reminding myself of how rewarding it’ll be, then I know I will make it to the end.