There are so many different events that I have experienced at New Trier and looking back at my four years here, they have all become memories that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Freshman year: We were all nervous on the first day. Sure, there may have been palpable excitement in everyone’s eyes as we each woke up, got ready and left our house for the first day of high school. But even the most composed freshman felt that inevitable anxiety begin to stir in their stomachs as they walked up the Northfield steps for the first time.
As a whole, freshman year was a blur. The freshman mixer, the Paranoia craze, our first finals in the winter. Of course the spectacle that is Turnabout and my first taste of what a 3rd quarter slump really feels like all remain vivid memories of freshman year.
But honestly freshman year is just the beginning; don’t worry little 9th graders because high school gets a lot better.
Sophomore year: The adjustment to the Winnetka campus is easier than it was adjusting to Northfield. It’s smaller; it feels a lot more like high school than the isolated freshman island in Northfield.
The new interactions with kids from other grades adds another social dimension to Winnetka. Additionally, you’re actually allowed to leave campus and even potentially leave school early, something so strictly forbidden at Northfield that we didn’t even think about it.
During sophomore year, friend groups begin to form more strongly as the chaos of meeting so many new people freshman year begins to cool off.
Classes get harder as teachers demand more of you because “You’re not a little freshman anymore.” Sports, plays, musicals, clubs all step it up a notch in competitiveness as well.
Homecoming brings excitement in the fall, and while the Turnabout mayhem from freshman year may have died down, it all dials up again for a couple months of madness in the winter.
In its entirety, sophomore year, for me, was about trying to learn as much as I could, while also bracing for what I knew was going to be a rough year ahead of me as a junior.
Junior year: It hits you fast. It hits you quickly and it hits you hard. APs, ACTs, SATs all overwhelm you as you realize that no matter how hard you keep working, there’s going to be a point when it’s 3 AM and you just can’t do anymore.
Varsity sports consume valuable time; auditions for various extracurriculars become extremely competitive; school matters more than ever and we finally get to go to Prom.
Junior Theme. For some it’s overhyped and overrated. It doesn’t matter much and thinking it does is a mistake. For others, it pulls you in for a few weeks, months or even the whole year and doesn’t release you from its grasp until every bit of intellectual energy and knowledge you have is gone. With everything that goes on, junior year is definitely the busiest year from start to finish, but once you take your last final in June, it’s smooth sailing to graduation. Right?
You’re a senior now and once you fill out a couple of easy college applications you’ll get into your dream school and dance the night away at the graduation party. Isn’t that how it works?
Not at all. First semester of senior year for most is the hardest semester of high school. On top of Varsity sports, clubs, extracurricular music, theatre, choir, AP classes and potential late ACT testing (which may even be more stressful than the junior year ACTs), first semester has college applications.
Now for those of you who don’t have any familiarity with college applications yet, it isn’t just a form you fill out the night before the app is due with the expectation that you’re actually going to get into the school.
It requires countless hours of writing, editing and revising essays and short answer questions, college counselor appointments and teacher recommendations.
And lets not forget college visits, determining safeties and reaches, and deciding to apply either early decision, early action or regular decision. There’s also an early decision II option to add to the confusion.
All of this weight is made even worse when the pressure of getting in somewhere begins to set in and your teachers, friends and even other kids you don’t know very well constantly ask what schools you’re applying to and where you’re going next year.
Semester number seven of high school is brutal, but once you make it past those cruel winter finals, with all of your college applications now submitted, semester number eight begins to ease the pain.
Sure, deciding on a college is still stressful and AP classes don’t get easier just because you’re now a second semester senior, but for the first time in high school you start to see the finish line.
The weather gets warmer and the amount of homework that you actually do diminishes, although you learn that grades actually do diminish along with your work ethic.
School doesn’t get easy, because in the end we’re New Trier and we still have to commit our minds to inquiry… well, at least every once in a while.
It’s been a good ride. It’s been amazing to see my classmates grow up from our awkward freshman selves: getting new haircuts, removing our braces, growing a few inches and maturing in ways that some of our freshman year teachers never could have imagined.
Enjoy high school while it lasts, but once the experience is over and you begin moving on from these hallowed Winnetka grounds, remember back to what started you on your journey into adulthood. Because like it or not, it was New Trier High School.