The halls of New Trier have felt a little empty during the past two weeks, and it’s not just because finals studying has turned us into sleep-deprived zombies. It’s also because our seniors are absent. And although it is admittedly nice to have some peace and quiet, it’s strange for us too. You seniors are going on to bigger and better things, but we sophomores and juniors are left behind. We are still getting used to the fact that no one remains to give us advice for next year or laugh bitterly when we attempt classes they already took. It’s just us now.
Of course, the transitions you face are more drastic than ours. If you’re going to college, you have to navigate the clichéd perils of difficult roommates, doing your own laundry, and the Freshman 15 (although some of you may have already experienced the Junior 15 when you were at New Trier). But no matter how far from home you are or who you are with, you will all have to figure out what to do every day when New Trier isn’t guiding—or dictating, depending on your point of view—your life.
If you’re like most of us here at New Trier, many of you have been anticipating your first days of college for a long time. You’ve prepared for this moment a lot, maybe too much, and we at the New Trier News hope that your experiences will live up to the hype. We hope that you will get the most out of your education as possible, and we hope that you can relax and enjoy it every now and then. Ideally, that’s what you’ll remember doing here in high school as well: not just your journey to college but what you experienced along the way.
But that definitely does not require you to romanticize your time at New Trier or nostalgically reminisce about all of your peers every day. That, after all, would probably be unhealthy.
This is why our final hope for you is that you will be able to leave New Trier behind. No matter how much you loved it or hated it, we hope that you will be able to forget it enough to move on with your life. To use another cheesy saying, it’s a new chapter for you, and we want you to approach it with an open mind. With that said, we underclassmen have not experienced what you are about to experience yet. So if you want really trustworthy advice, you would be better off talking to a college student, just like we have talked to you over the past few years.
With that in mind, we would like to thank the outgoing staff of the New Trier News for setting the bar high for us. We hope that we can honor them by continuing to make the News as strong and innovative as it can be. We expect it to be an exciting year.