It is that time of year again! For our seniors, this season brings its unique blend of anticipation and anxiety, where burnout is as common as a morning cup of coffee. The stress that comes with senior year is an undeniable weight on the shoulders of highschool students.
For many, senior year has been talked about as the time to kick back, relax, and breeze through the home stretch of highschool.
“Lies.” Senior Sophia Icsezen says. “I feel as though responsibilities are rising while the reality of senioritis is kicking in. Add onto the fact that I feel I am deciding on the biggest decision of life – college.”
Between looming college applications, SAT scores, and extracurricular commitments, seniors find themselves juggling more than ever.
Aidan Takeda, a senior also navigating the chaotic world of senior year, rates his stress at a solid 7 out of 10 and with a mix of humor and honesty, he admits to procrastination and bottling up the pressure.
“I try to not really think about it. But a lot of the time when it is brought up to the surface I try to just put a cap on it and push it down.” says Takeda.
As we dive deeper into these experiences, we start to wonder: do students truly acknowledge the stressors they face, or are they simply brushing it off as part of the process? Could it be that the real challenge isn’t the workload, but how society conditions them to manage it?
Beneath the surface, these stressors aren’t as easily dismissed as they seem. Senior Cameron Reeves discusses the overwhelming fear that is latched onto the start of the school year, particularly with the realization that this is his last year of highschool.
“I feel like I’m running out of time,” Reeves says.
This feeling of being on the edge of something monumental – of needing to meet expectations they’ve been trained to uphold – speaks to a larger issue: The way we frame success and endurance.
While students are conditioned to power through, the real challenge may not lie in just the workload; it’s the constant demand to manage stress in ways that often involve suppressing it. Constantly being told to handle it, juggle it, and keep moving forward but rarely being encouraged to pause and truly assess how this stress impacts students’ emotional and mental well-being.
When asking what motivates seniors to continue despite the mounting pressure that settles on an individual’s shoulders, there was a constant response: The knowledge that others have traveled this path before and completed it.
“There are hundreds of seniors that have done it before us, so it’s obviously possible,” Reeves says. “You just have to do your best.”
