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November 11, 2005 > Opinion > Why senior year without senioritis isn’t so bad

Why senior year without senioritis isn’t so bad

By Nathan Black | Thresher Editorial Staff

Long after she should have relinquished her keys, an old woman ran a stop sign and broadsided my older brother’s car. He was a Will Rice College senior; I was a senior in high school.

A few weeks later, my brother sent my family an e-mail containing what he had been spending part of his seventh semester working on: a standardized “accident report form” for us to print out and carry around in our glove compartments. My parents smiled and rolled their eyes. I, meanwhile, was outraged.

“What the hell is he doing down there?” I snapped. My senior year of high school thus far had been a never-ending grind of AP classes, college applications, a co-editorship of a mutinous newspaper staff, two almost simultaneous theater productions and a thousand smaller commitments — and my brother was screwing around making paperwork. “Senior year at Rice must be really great,” I said.

And at that moment I started looking forward to my senior year of college — especially when I decided to go to the same school as my brother. At Rice, I said to myself, senior year would be everything it hadn’t been in high school. I would take 12 hours. I would quit all clubs and jobs, or have positions in them in which I did nothing. Once it got tolerable outside, I would just sit in the warm Texas sun and enjoy a bona fide senior year, without a Common Application in sight.

Well, here I am in semester number seven. I’m busier than I have ever been — at Rice or in my life. I thoroughly enjoy my classes and everything else I do around campus, but I’m certainly not soaking up the sun on a typical weekday afternoon.

When I have a spare brain cell between work, sleep and the Thresher, I sometimes wonder if I am doing my senior year right. All those AP classes from high school have given me the option to slack; instead, I’m toiling away at my prestigious school so I can be admitted to prestigious post-graduate pursuits and toil some more. It just seems a little pointless sometimes.

But then I remember what senioritis was really like at my high school and what the consequences were. Those kids were ridiculous. The senioritis-affected ditched class and played hackeysack — a Colorado thing? — all day before throwing semi-wild, “Let’s pretend we’re in college” parties at night. When not ditching, they took classes like jewelry. Or, to dodge English, they took newspaper journalism, where they were an integral element of the mutiny on my staff. After they flushed those nine months of their lives down the toilet, they generally trudged off to second-tier state schools, despite the fact that many of them were quite smart.

This classic case of senioritis is totally incompatible with who I am. However fondly I yearned for a lazy last year of college, I believed four years ago — and I believe now — that only a busy life is rewarding. And just like in high school, in order to earn the right to stay busy and intellectually engaged after graduation, I have to stay busy now.

Besides, if I were truly embracing senioritis, I would probably enjoy it for a week and then become so bored that I would, well, do something like make an accident report form.

That said, I do hope I have the chance this year to experience the more enriching aspects of senioritis. I want the chance to take some unusual classes — not fluffy classes, but classes in academic areas that are unfamiliar to me now and that will probably be inaccessible to me after I graduate. And I want time to reflect on the last four years and do some thinking about my big-picture life goals — by which I do not mean worrying about where I’m working next fall (I’m doing that already).

Somehow I’ll just manage to fit those things into my normal schedule. I no longer seriously feel the urge to throw all commitments to the wind and chill out for a year. Which is good, because now that warm Texas sun is setting around 5 p.m.

Nathan Black is a Lovett College senior and senior editor.

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