Don’t believe the hype
By Sadie Allen
Don’t get me wrong, it is totally valid for seniors to get a little lazy toward the end of their high school career. Seniors begin getting their college decisions as early as December and course workload tends to decrease after college app season, but senioritis isn’t an unstoppable force all seniors succumb to.
Seniortis is the lack of motivation seniors experience due to knowing where they are going after graduation and/or feeling fatigued from in high school in general. Both these reasons are logical because it is okay to feel tired, but senioritis can be kept under control.
Seniors who know exactly where they are going or what they want to do tend to develop senioritis the fastest. They feel they’ve done everything they needed to – getting into college – but that shouldn’t be the mentality. You should always be working toward a goal, big or small.
Maybe you want to read more books this year, so put in extra effort to get your work done so you can go to the media center to read. Maybe you really want to support your friend in their sport, so you get your work turned in on time to go see their game after school. If you continue to work toward these small goals, finishing high school strong will be much easier.
Senioritis can also be very damaging. Most colleges require students to submit a final copy of their transcript in July. This is done to see if the student has sustained the same level of rigor and quality in their work as when they were first accepted.
If your dream school sees that you have any academic integrity violations, like plagiarism or cheating, they can revoke your admission offer, leaving you without a place to go after you graduate. Some universities revoke admission offers based on a significant drop in grades.
If you find yourself struggling from senioritis, think of it like this. Before you graduate, you want to establish good habits. You don’t want to practice procrastination and carelessness for a whole semester, especially if you’re going to college. Continue the good habits you established as an underclassman and don’t fall into the trap of senioritis.
You have to be content with your life regardless of what you have to look forward to. Make the best of your senior year and don’t lose motivation.
We deserve to be lazy
By Hannah Posner
When I got accepted to college this December, one of the first things I did to celebrate was not studying for a test in my AP Statistics class. I allowed myself to completely butcher it. I also didn’t even spare a glance at the review packet for the final exam. And I have no regrets!
When people complain about having senioritis (a lack of motivation for schoolwork in senior year, especially second semester) they act like it’s a bad thing. Look, I’m not saying you should fail out of your classes, but you should feel free to lean into that lack of motivation. After working hard for three and a half years, trying to get good grades and figure out what we want to do after high school, seniors deserve a bit of good old fashioned senioritis.
Your grades might slip as you put less time and effort to school, but in most cases this is not a bad thing. Colleges won’t rescind your acceptance unless you do dramatically worse– getting a letter grade or two below your usual is not only accepted but expected. And, though many scholarships require you to submit your GPA, the most recent official one is from first semester, when you hopefully didn’t have senioritis yet.
There’s a reason you don’t have the energy to keep up your grades: you’ve been working very hard for a long time, maybe sacrificing socialization and sleep. The senioritis “laziness” isn’t lazy at all. You’re just catching up on relaxation that you denied yourself throughout high school. Taking this break will help you replenish your energy and avoid burnout so that you can enter college with excitement and motivation.
Senioritis is not about lying in bed all day. It’s about spending more time with friends and family and only working on things that you are passionate about. If you are going to college far from home, it’s especially important to cherish the time you have now with your loved ones (as cheesy as that sounds).
If you have a hobby or passion you’ve been spending less time on due to schoolwork or college applications, you’ll probably find yourself naturally returning to it now. For me, I had put my personal writing on the back burner to focus on writing college essays. Now, I’m back to working on my novel, and it’s making me a lot happier than college essays.
So, maybe I completely forgot to put a works cited page on my English essay, and maybe I’ve shown up late a few too many times to first period, but there’s a big weight off my shoulders. Things will never matter less than in the second semester of your senior year of high school! You might as well have fun!
