Youth Opinion : Eek! The Plague of ‘Insufferable Senior-itis’

It isn’t long after the winter break that the dreaded plague can strike, without warning and without mercy. Once students have it, it’s nearly impossible to recover. Maybe you know some of its victims. Or maybe you are one. That’s right, I’m talking about the insufferable ailment known only as “high school senior-itis.” I know. I’m a survivor.

In my case, it began right after the holidays. My classes suddenly seemed boring and unimportant. I’d already made lots of A’s and plenty of B’s and all my college applications were in the mail. I felt I’d done all the hard work and now I could relax. I started coasting in most of my classes, even ditched a few.

It hit fever pitch the day I got a big envelope in the mail that carried a big certificate with big letters that said: “Congratulations! You have been accepted to UC Santa Cruz,” my top choice. My girlfriend got accepted to the same school. Other friends enjoyed equally good news from the schools of their choice.

I thought I was home free and virtually stopped studying. My grade point average dropped from 3.2 to 1.8 in a matter of months, but, hey, I was already accepted. What could they do to me now? I was determined to enjoy my last few weeks of high school--I was gonna have fun. And I did, for a little while.

But then it all came crashing down.

It started when my best friend received a letter from the college he wanted to attend, stating that his acceptance would be retracted unless his grades improved. He was really shaken up. Then my American Literature teacher told me after class one day that I was failing her class, and if I didn’t get my act together I might not graduate! It was like a nightmare: There I was facing the end of my college years before they had even begun. All the hard work I’d done for 3 1/2 years was about to go down the drain, just because I’d spent the last few months of my senior year slacking off.

Fortunately, my best friend and I both took immediate action. He wrote a letter to his college admissions officer, promising to bring his grades up. We both took on extra credit assignments and started studying hard to pass final exams. We both got out of our jams, but we did it the hard way: lots of extra work at the very time we should have been enjoying our last days of high school. Not to mention the dreaded wrath of the parental units: Both of us were grounded for weeks. And those were weeks full of parties and fun that I wish I could have back.

Now that I’m 25, it’s easy to look back and see how stupid I was. But at the time, it just didn’t seem possible that I could come that close to utter disaster. I guess back then I couldn’t see that far ahead to know how much college would mean to me. But those next four years were the best of my life.