Senioritis…in High Schoolers?

If you are in your final year of high school, chances are you received your diploma results this past weekend, whether you wanted to or not.  As I was discussing how my exams went with a friend of mine, she mentioned that she was beginning to be afflicted by senioritis.  At the time, I was confused, because based solely on the “senior” part of senioritis, I assumed that it was something that only afflicted, well, seniors…

However, after conducting some research and asking around, I discovered that senioritis is/and

• A) Not an actual disease
• B) Doesn’t really affect senior citizens, but instead “seniors” in high school

It turns out that senioritis is a very unofficial yet extremely prevalent trend in graduating high school students, (which happens to be myself and many of those around me).

So what is senioritis? Senioritis is, in essence, the wave of laziness that tends to affect graduating students who have already been accepted to university in their first semester of high school.  Since high school itself is basically the entrance exam to university, when the end goal is achieved students can sometimes relax a bit too much.  Symptoms of Senioritis include:

• laziness
• not taking classes as seriously as you did before
• being late
• not doing homework
• a  more relaxed mindset
• caring less and putting in less effort

If you did well on your diplomas and classes, chances are you might be experiencing a bit of this senioritis phenomenon- it’s hard to avoid, in all honesty.  Yes, you should definitely be proud of yourself for doing well, but don’t let your good results get to your head too much! If you think you’re experiencing senioritis (I know myself and a lot of my friends definitely are), you should be careful.

Remember that universities look at your full year transcript to guarantee your acceptance- if there’s a huge drop in your classes in the last bit of high school, and you’ve been working hard for all those other years, wouldn’t it be tragic if you were withdrawn from admittance just because you got too relaxed?  Senioritis, when affecting grades, is definitely a cause of university withdrawal- if they see that you’re not as committed as they thought you were, they may not want you anymore.  Withdrawal is probably the worst case scenario, but there are other bad cases that you would certainly want to avoid as well.  One can be that the universities put you on academic probation-meaning you still get accepted but you have to maintain a certain GPA, and another is the withdrawal of financial aid.  Be careful!

So how can you cure senioritis?  Well of course, the best cure is to not be affected by it in the first place.  Perhaps some of you are approaching your senior year, and after reading this article and finding out about senioritis this will be the case 🙂

However, if you are already experiencing the symptoms of senioritis, here are small things you can do to prevent it from developing into something that could harm you:

All that being said, don’t fall into the trap of senioritis, but remember to still enjoy your last semester of high school! You probably have worked pretty hard to get where you are today.

High school is supposedly one of the best time periods in life, so might as well make the most of it

-Sincerely, a fellow graduating student.