By Jasmine Pascual, Staff Writer/Webmaster
Indian Trail High School & Academy’s senior Hawks are tying up their loose ends and leaving their nests to begin life beyond the horizon.
Ever since I was a freshman, I always looked up to the upperclassmen like they were these glorious and dignified people.
Once I became a senior, I knew that meant the roles would be reversed and I quickly learned how unrealistic my thoughts of being a senior were.
Prior to my senior year, I didn’t believe that the common disease senioritis that I saw sweep across the senior classes would ever affect me. That is, until my senior year hit.
Joking aside, I thought being a high school senior would be as glamorous as it looked in the movies but from my experience in high school, I unfortunately found out it is nothing like the movies.
High school doesn’t have flash mobs like in High School Musical, and students don’t skip school to join parade floats to lip-sync to Wayne Newton’s cover of “Danke Schoen” like in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
As deceiving as movies I watched in my adolescence were, I still enjoyed them as much as the next person.
Movies like Mean Girls taught me that popular girls exhibit no actual human emotions and break men’s hearts for sport, and Clueless told me if a girl got a makeover, suddenly she’ll become confident and popular enough to overthrow the popularity curve. And let’s not forget the students from The Breakfast Club, who showed audiences since 1985, we’re more than our stereotypes.
Every student already knows by their senior year that high school isn’t the popularity-based kingdom movies portray it to be.
Indian Trail has more than 2,000 students and I know that the people I see every day aren’t so stereotypical. I also know I will probably never see these people again. I’m not quite concerned about friends because there are always ways to keep in touch. Although I stuck to my main group of friends and a few that I met my senior year, there are so many people who I’ve never met that I see almost every day.
At a school this large, I see a new face every day. I had almost four years to meet as many people as possible, and I still stumble over remembering names. Those people who I haven’t gotten to know, I can’t help but see them as a missed opportunity. A missed opportunity in that I could’ve learned from them, laughed at their jokes and heard their stories and experiences, anything that I could attach to their face other than a mislabeling stereotype.
In spite of that, if I had the chance to redo my high school experience, I wouldn’t. I refuse to live in regret, so I’m going to smile and admire my four years at IT.