They say that high school and college are the best years of your life. High school definitely was not one of the best parts of my life, but college, maybe. Why should high school and college be the best years of my life, anyway? Why should I go through this experience thinking it pretty much goes downhill from here, or at the very least doesn’t get more exciting? I certainly hope I have years to come filled with adventure and new experiences with friends and family. I hope that that doesn’t stop when I graduate from college.

Transitioning from middle school into high school was an exciting time of my life, and having more freedom and responsibility at home and at school was pretty great. I played sports all four years, soccer for the first three, track and field for two. Playing sports was my favorite part of high school; I always looked forward to team dinners and bus rides to away games. Everyone came together for the team sport and it didn’t matter who you were friends with or who you didn’t really like. Other than sports, high school was a socially lonely time in my life.

I had a solid friend group for the first two years; sometimes we went to football games or had sleepovers on the weekends. There were also a lot of ways that I changed in high school and friends change, too. We grew apart and spent less time hanging out, and by the time I graduated, all of my friends were friends that didn’t go to my school. I was always friendly with classmates and teammates, but didn’t hang out with anyone after school. So I played sports and did well in all of my classes and saw friends that went to different schools occasionally because of heavy workloads. I spent so much time in high school worrying about what other people thought about me that I became more and more socially nervous. I’m a shy person to begin with, so becoming quieter didn’t help me make friends.

College was a time for me to start over, and living on such a large campus with so many students helped me open up more and I made friends pretty easily. I have a few close friends and a bunch of friends I see on campus all the time. Looking back at high school, I don’t necessarily regret not being social because it helped me learn a lot about myself and the kind of person I wanted to be in the future. I can say now that I’m happy with the person I am today and the way my life is going, and I wouldn’t change my past experiences. Now that I’m getting ready to graduate a year from now, I’m looking forward to going to grad school and then seeing what life has in store for me.