Ah! Senior year, the year of happiness.. or not.

We should be having the time of our lives right now, you know, considering the fact that we are finally approaching our last months of high school. Instead, many of us are worried or preparing for the new role of being an adult. Are we as high school students really prepared for our launch into the dark, scary, serious life of being an adult?

“I feel like I have a good understanding of what the adult world is gonna be like but
I don’t think I’m necessarily ready for all the things that come with adulthood,” said senior Samantha Hadyniak.

Going from a child for all your life, being able to rely on your parents, no financial responsibility, and just being able to relax and let life pass you by has been a breeze. Sure, we’ve all seen the things our parents do as being an adult. So we all know the basics of what it requires essentially. But being an adult is more than just paying bills and raising kids. It comes with a new mental state and whole new sense of responsibility, something that majority of us are just not ready for.

“I want to have as much freedom as possible but this transition might be hard because as much everyone wants to say high school prepares you for college, college is nothing like high school,” Hadyniak continued.

In school we hear our teachers say things like, “I’m trying to get you ready for college” or “In college they won’t be as lenient as we are here.” I mean sure we learn useful things here in high school that we can use in the real world, but at the end of the day are they really helping to prepare us for what the outside world will offer? Or is school all about the curriculum and that only? Food for thought.

Senior Marcel Mecks, however, feels differently about the subject at hand.

“I feel I’m ready to start a new life for myself and really start making decisions for myself,” he said.

Being free is probably one of the only things we teenagers really look forward to about being an adult. Most of us have been on lock down and under careful surveillance since we were born. This is the finally the time we will soon be able to be free and just do what we want to a certain extent. Some of us look at this transition as a gateway to a new life, since it’s something that we’ve never experienced before.

In all honesty there’s no real way to get prepared for certain things, some things just require experience to gain knowledge. So how could we as teenagers be prepared and ready for the transition into adulthood in the first place?

“I feel like I’ve been told everything I need in order to transition and make it in the adult world,” says senior August James. “But I feel once I get there, I’ll be lost.”

The whole transaction just gives most of us anxiety by default. How in the world are we supposed to know what to do? Majority of us barely know how to grocery shop on our own or even scramble an egg. Of course we will feel lost: we will soon be on our own, taking care of ourselves!

Senior Kayla Myles agrees with the fact that we are not very prepared for the responsibilities we will soon have.

“I haven’t had any real preparation with things like handling bills or just being in bad grown-up situations,” she said.

In all honesty we are all not alone; we are most likely going through the same anxiety about now becoming an adult. Whether we want the change to come or not, it will still make its way around to every single last one of us to get us very soon.