My thoughts on high school graduation

One of the most bittersweet events in life is graduation. It marks the end of the period in our lives where we’re more prone to make mistakes, when we desperately want to live a more independent life and where we endured the rigid high school system. But it also marks the beginning of a new time in our lives where we take the courses we choose, decide what time of day we want to take them, when we get to leave the safety of our parents’ care and be on our own for the first time. It’s new and exciting, but it’s also scary and saddening. We bear with us the memories we made with the friends we met throughout high school and head off to find new people and form new relationships.

The unhappy side of graduation aside, this day is the time to celebrate the three years of hard work and endurance. In Grade 10, I enrolled in high school, unaware of all the workload that would soon ensue. I had to adjust to the amount of homework and reading that was required, not to mention the complicated routes to classes, getting lost in the staircases and hallways, and heading to the wrong class. In Grade 11, I had no problem getting to the right classes and I got used to the pace of school work. And finally, this year, time seemed to pass by so much quicker than in the last two years. I think with the heavier workload, time passed by that much faster. And now that IB exams are over and diploma exams are approaching, we’re caught once again in the midst of the work that still needs to be done. But despite the staggering amount of work, we should never forget to spend whatever time we have left with the ones we care about. I had thought that graduating from junior high was depressing, but faced with the near prospect of leaving behind the people I met in high school, it seems an even more impossible task.

Moving onto different phases of our lives may be hard to do, but we learn from the experiences of our past to help us progress.

Congratulations to all graduating classes of 2012!