Hard work finally paid off in September of the year 2000. I reached the final step of my journey through King George High School. I prepared myself for a very difficult year.
Many people do not know what’s involved in the senior year of high school for a college bound student. It’s not an easy time. There are college applications to fill out. Each application has an average of 2 essays. Each essay requires a lot of thought. They are often redone 3 or 4 times before the student feels they are ready. A student also has to fill out the many tedious parts of the application about their personal information, the classes they took, and the grades they received. This is often to worst part of the application because there is nothing a student can do to alter the grades they earned in the past. If they slacked off in 9th grade, they pay for it now. The 5 pages that make up an application have the power to decide a student’s future. Therefore, it’s a nerve-wracking process to get into college.
The horrible task of applying to college is not the only difficult part of a senior year. On top of all the work one puts into applications, students are also expected to make a rigorous class load and succeed in each of their classes. The workload is doubled during a student’s senior year.
Many seniors attempt to work a part-time job. They create for themselves a basically sleepless existence. Its not a simple task to juggle work, school, homework, and the various college applications and still have time for sleep. Seniors often are working from 8am to 2 am the next day. This provides a 19 hour workday. Sleep is a luxury they don’t have but its not all bad. There are some perks to being a sleepless zombie, I mean senior.
As my senior year began, I felt like queen of the world. I had a great job. My classes were set. I was told I could get into any college I wanted. I was planning to go to France for second semester. I knew I would get a great parking spot. Most of all, I only had to look at King George High School for 5 more months. I was living a dream life, but like with most dreams reality intervened. My great job began interfering with my loads of homework. My new guidance counselor screwed up my classes. Mr. Stello told me that I would have to go to community college before any college would accept me. My dream of France got crushed when my guidance counselor told me I couldn’t graduate if I didn’t take science second semester. I got the furthest possible parking spot, and most of all I had to see King George High School for 10 more months. Even these dampers to my sunny day did not crush me completely. I arrived at school, a little distraught, but prepared to work my butt off.
The first day of school went along in a normal way. My first block was what I correctly anticipated would be my most taxing class, AP English. Mrs. Dibble was very funny and nice. I had many of my good friends in the class, including Mike Hall, Kat Spooner, Katie Ward and Courtney Craig. There were also the added joys of the Testosterone Section (Dave, Baz, and Stutler) and the Jeremies Double Trouble Over the Line Team. Before I’d even been to my other classes, I knew English would be the politically incorrect highlight of my day.