Senior Moments: Preparation and Paperwork

For many, January is a month of preparation. We’re preparing for the year ahead and preparing our resolutions. High school students — seniors in particular — are preparing for college. We’re truly in the homestretch now, with less than eight months before most of us move out and begin our independent lives. I’ll admit, I’m a bit daunted by the prospect of being my own person, but I’m also excited. Everyone around me is. We have to be excited because time only moves forward, and for now, we prepare.

Our future is so intimidating because it’s unknown, but we’ve already decided what we want our futures to look like; now, we get to start implementing our plans. For most of us, that plan includes more education. So what are we high school seniors even doing to ready ourselves for college and the year ahead? We’re writing. Writing essays, letters, resumes. Writing our names, social security numbers and addresses on housing, dining and financial contracts. Writing our hopes and dreams down wherever we can so we don’t forget what we’re striving toward. A lot of us have been accepted to a few different colleges, and some of us have even chosen which university we want to attend. But most of us are still mulling over our options, pinpointing strengths and weaknesses, trying to fit campus visits into our schedules, and to put it candidly, waiting to see which of our dream colleges will give us the most money.

Scholarships, you see, decide where we can go, how much money we can spend and what our housing accommodations will look like. They determine whether or not we’ll have to work every evening and weekend. Scholarships are blessings and curses, because money for education is great, but we have to write essays and answer questions like, “What’s your biggest fear and how do you overcome it?” and “Tell us about yourself and your goals,” and “What is an event in your life that changed how you view the world?” I’ve never bragged about myself as much as I have in the past three months. I’m frankly exhausted with all the soul-searching and self-promotion, but I really want to graduate debt-free.

We are working hard, and we’re enjoying our senior year of high school. It’s busy and blissfully dull at the same time. The process is very repetitive, and many of us are past worrying whether or not we’ll be accepted; we’ve moved on to worrying about finances and actually moving out. It’s both a taxing and hopeful time, especially in the middle of a pandemic, but we can’t do anything except soldier on and maybe take a nap every once in a while. Balancing school work, jobs, college applications, scholarship essays and personal life is truly a skill my peers and I have mastered. I’m so proud of how far we’ve come, but we aren’t finished yet. This January, we prepare for all the work we still have left for this year.

Hello, 2021. We are here to take you by storm.

Greta Ripperda is a senior at Notre Dame Regional High School in Cape Girardeau. She is the firstborn of four and enjoys reading, hiking, spending time with family and making music.