High school is a very significant 4 years where students make the transition from children to adults. Filled with the stress of academic competition and doing extracurriculars, high school allows kids to make some very important decisions about their futures.

However, when asked about high school regrets, seniors rarely ever say academics. 

While joining a club their freshman year could have helped them get on the executive board or getting better test scores could have helped them get a better GPA, these don’t even occur to most seniors when reflecting on their high school years.

Many students wish they hadn’t been so hard on themselves over one bad test or had chosen to go hang out with friends instead of staying home to do one extra practice test. While the results of these actions have a positive impact on college applications, it takes away from truly being a child.

Reflecting on her own high school years, junior Jocelyn Bock shares one of her biggest regrets. “Prioritizing academics in high school is a difficult choice to make, because it means I put my future self above my present self. It means I spend less time with my friends creating good relationships, but it also means my future will hopefully be better or easier,” Bock voiced. “I’ll never not regret it, but it’s what needs to be done.”

High school years are when students are able to be the most careless versions of themselves without having to worry about many permanent consequences. While they have the opportunity to make lasting friendships and engage in hobbies they truly enjoy, students often find themselves stuck in trying to be better than their peers and trying to fill their college apps with meaningless extracurriculars.

Junior Abhinav Anthati believes that the way academics are organized in school should be improved. “Now, while academics is very important, I feel that sometimes teachers are not communicating with other departments enough, leaving the students spending most of their day if not their entire day just doing academic work,” Anthati states. “This leaves little to no free time for other activities such as spending time with family and friends.”

Students that tend to engage in fewer social activities throughout high school have a harder time building friendships in college. While they might be prepared for the academic rigor of university, building a community of people to truly support each other can get difficult when they are starting from scratch.