For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been told that to be a senior is to exist at the pinnacle of high school achievement and responsibility. To some degree, I’ve found this to be true. We’re the ones leading clubs, presiding over meetings, organizing and planning events—having been at this school for so long, we’re the ones who are familiar with oiling the joints of the machine by performing up to the standard of our obligations. All around me, I’ve seen my fellow seniors hard at work throughout all four years but especially so in the last term, pulling through and stepping up, whether that has meant staying up late to edit articles, or conducting interviews with dozens of people to find the right candidate to fill a club spot. 

Recently, however, this pinnacle has felt more like a slope. With college apps over and the lush valley of the next three months in front of us, any more work obligations feel almost extraneous. In conversations with friends who lead clubs and organizations on campus, a common topic is the slack that we’ve started to let our responsibilities have. I’m not going to name names, but it’s been as bad as forgetting to turn in the club renewal application on the part of what was once one of the biggest science organizations on campus. Which is to say that while everyone said senioritis would be bad, I never thought it would be so all-encompassing. 

Still, though I might be the first to bemoan just how much work I still have to do even with my applications out of the way, I’m also going to be the first to urge every last one of us to keep at the activities that have long enriched our afternoons. While being editor-in-chief of The Nexus was probably a nice line to have in my Common Application activity list, having that line wasn’t the reason I joined our newspaper, and my passion for it, and your passion for your club or sport or organization, exists outside of any timeline or resume. 

So, my brave fellow senior, for the sake of the shaky junior that I know we all once were, I implore you to put your best foot forward. Whether you may acknowledge it or not, our class has carried Westview through milestone moments. We have managed through the beginning of quarantine and the end of online school, earned a Blue Ribbon award and adjusted to staff turnover. Our experiences have given us insight, and I think that it’s important to set our underclassman friends up for success, even if that will look different for everyone of us, and even if we’re only doing it to be able to be satisfied with ourselves come graduation. 

College apps might be over, but high school certainly isn’t. That last application turn-in date wasn’t our time to stop moving forward with as much momentum as possible—if anything, now is the best time for us to exert effort in the extracurricular sense.