Even though we are just freshmen, our parents and teachers often remind us just how short our time in high school will be. Just four short years after we leave middle school– less than half a decade– all of the planning for college is over, while work and the whole real-world experience suddenly begin. But even with that in mind, we new high schoolers still sometimes find it hard to put this into perspective. We think of college as a sort of perpetually approaching future; it’s a future that we know we are getting closer and closer to, but that we don’t fully think of as ever becoming a reality. However, as the end of the year draws near, and as we watch the senior class take their final steps out of high school and their first steps into college, we are reminded that, yes, graduation is in fact a real thing. Only a few short years separate the two ends of high school chronology, and very soon, we will find ourselves reminiscing about our time as freshmen, thinking about how foreign a concept graduation once was.

Think of school as a cycle, or like different levels in a video game: we enter a new school, unfamiliar with our new surroundings. We work our way up through the grades, growing more and more accustomed to our environment with each passing year. But just when we think we’ve fully settled in, it’s time to transition into a new school, and begin the cycle again. To a certain extent, college still follows this same pattern. Still, something about this transition, like no other, seems like such a huge leap. As 9th-graders, we are no strangers to this school-to-school cycle. We’ve lived it for the past 9 years (10 if you count kindergarten). But to think about departing from the traditional educational progression that we are so used to, to think about our 12th-grade year coming to a close and not having a grade 13 waiting for us, seems so strange. Soon enough, though, we will find ourselves at the end of the road in this regard, about to embark on a whole new adventure in our time after high school.