First semester seniors, you all know by now the emotional and mental roller coaster of being a first semester senior. Scholarships, endless amounts of scholarships, college applications. But let’s not forget to stack on the $50 application fees. Also, you must apply to four or five colleges, so the total amount you pay for applications adds up to $200 to $250. This is the amount you are paying to college applications alone, this is not included in tuition or books cost, to colleges you may or may not get accepted into. Sounds like a great start to our last first semester, right?

Everything is so mind boggling, mostly because we were tossed into an unknown world, without a lick of knowledge about what is going to happen next. Sort of like a fish out of water. On top of homework we have to apply to schools, let’s not forget those scholarship! No one wants college debt, so fill out as many scholarships as possible.

If I have learned anything in the last four years of my high school career, it’s this: you can fit a week’s worth of work into one night. Sure, you have to go through a whole Starbucks and a half to get the job done, but it is definitely possible. High school has prepared us to be the most practiced procrastinators we can be. If they had a Procrastinating Olympics, we probably wouldn’t start training until the day of, and even then we’d still hold it off until the very last minute. There is also that constant battle you go through every day after school; Do I take a nap or be productive? Surely, after 8 hours of doing school work the cant expect us to do homework. Unfortunately it is expected and sometimes required.

Now we get to call each other second semester seniors. This senior is at rock bottom of senioritis. It’s too hard to come back from the overwhelming desire for graduation. Panic rises, as we all try to cram in as much scholarships as we possibly can, because it doesn’t take a mathematician to calculate how much college tuition can be. Now is the time we start to plaster on our most scholarly smiles and convince all our teachers to write enumerable teacher recommendations for us. This is the year where our guidance counselors become our best friends (if not already). Most of us arefilling out applications on where we will spend the next four years of our lives and we attempt to make the admissions office like us without the introduction, can you imagine the pressure as I type my admissions essay. I’m still trying to figure out how to convince the people who have ​met me to like me. But because most of us have senioritis it’s hard to do scholarships, let alone homework.

But you can’t give up, you have to come back, you can’t quit now because too much is at stake. Those college admissions are not permanent until your final transcript is complete. This transcript includes both first semester and second semester of senior year. Don’t allow your GPA’s to drop just for senioritis. Be proud when you graduate, don’t regret letting that GPA or class rank fall. End the year with a bang. Plus, do we really want to be in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for a piece of paper on the wall?