Trying to Forget the Crushing Defeats since 2009

Somewhere between final projects for classes, a hellacious case of senioritis, and the burden of sending a deposit to one of the seven colleges and universities to which I was accepted, I broke down.

It was a tweet, actually, that reminded me of my tumultuous senior year, a tweet from the Dean of Students at Boston University that linked to a New York Times Magazine piece on the waning influence of Senior Year in High School. The Times, while leery to take a side, says that much of high school is spent with “chronic truancy and sloppy dancing in rented clothes.”

Yes, this is me in rented clothes with my hot date.

Well, duh.

But what the New York Times disregarded (probably because they just didn’t find it) is that, for a few of us, our senior year in high school was an experience that taught us little book-knowledge but gave us great tools we could use later on.

I got…a voice.

My first three years of high school were spent following directions: I wrote a lot of 800-word critical analysis essays and spent hours memorizing the meanings of synecdoche and the KREBS cycle.

My senior year, however, I met a man who changed my life. His name was Michael Wall.

Michael Wall was an infamous character around the halls at OJR High. Everyone knew he was a hard grader–only the best got A’s in his class–but his classroom antics and ability to get his students in contact with their actual emotions when writing were legendary.

Eager to impress Mr. Wall, I wrote my first essay about the difficulties of coming out. The writing was a little staid, the emotions a little flat, and my grade–a B- –was terrible by honor-student standards. But with every additional assignment, the grades rose. Better than that was the fact that I learned how to write well, whether about myself, others, or a piece of literature.

And a funny thing happened: I gained a voice.

At the end of the year when my AP exam wanted me to write a stupid essay about literary elements in a “classic work of great literature,” I delivered a great FU to the people of the College Board by writing about the literary qualities of “The Devil Wears Prada.” For reasons I still don’t understand, I got a 5 on the exam. Mr. Wall knew why: he said I had found my voice and I had used it.

A year later I decided to take my “voice” and stick it on the internet for a class project. “little victories” was born, and a couple of my friends read it, and I was happy to speak my mind every once in a while. I sent a link to my blog with the resumé I sent to a little internet startup company in Somerville, Mass. They called me back 30 minutes later: they wanted an interview. The operations director for the company later admitted that my blog–which she “found very witty”–was the reason she hired me.

I understand the conflict at hand: students like me learned very little after we submitted our college applications during the fall and winter of our senior years, and we wasted a lot of time between January and June. But so many of us learned life lessons, did things that we had put on hold while we polished our college resumés. We learned the true meaning of friendship, found our voices. A few of us fell in love. We learned how to get to college, where we threw out half of what we learned and started over again.

But none of us did nothing. Just remember that the next time you look to your senior year ready to call it completely useless.