A couple days before we went to press, I still had no idea what I wanted to write about. I contemplated different ideas, but I felt no inspiration. I had nothing.

A question lingered in my mind. Why was I having so much difficulty coming up with a topic? Yes, I’ll usually change my mind at least three times before coming up with a subject. But this was different. The frustrating ennui I felt extended beyond the 600 words I had to write, to my classes and to school. Honey, I have senioritis.

After a 12-year stint of waking up at unreasonable hours to attend classes in a six-hour block five days a week, I’m burnt out. It’s been a mostly positive experience – I’ve made some close friends, had great teachers and good times – but the daily grind has gotten me down. Is apathy an inevitable conclusion to 12 years of the same daily routine, or is there some flaw in the scholastic time line?

It’s not simply that I’m sick of the work or the daily drudgery; I’ve outgrown high school. I’m itching to start the next episode of my life and each school day seems like a deterrent of that desire. I’m lightyears ahead of my freshman self in maturity and yet I’m still more or less stuck in the same routine. I need new challenges and high school has become less than stimulating.

Schools should be more adaptive to the whirlwind of changes we go through, instead of forcing us into the same routine every single year. As a result, senior year is a joke. Senioritis. Ha. Blow-off classes. Ha.

In its defense, senior year provides a buffer to college. A lighter workload is an opportunity to remove yourself from the usual pressures of high school and focus on something else – a team, friends, family – before entering the next stage of life. In some ways, before we’re ready to move on, we need to be a little bored.

Yet this is not a very satisfying justification for the languid manner of senior year. There are fun aspects to senior year, but ultimately, I’m restless and impatient.

WJ has a few options to break up the senior routine and I implore you to take advantage of them. There are opportunities for internships and jobs, in addition to the UMD Young Scholars program. While it may be enticing to take a full schedule of joke classes, you will appreciate the change in pace.

Despite the jokes, at its core, senioritis is not about laziness. We’re not an entire class of apathetic, whining people. Most of us are mentally beyond high school and are anxious to open the next door. While a drastic shift in the way schools are run would be nice, realistically, it’s up to you. Everyone will experience senioritis, from those who’ve felt it since freshman year, to those straight-A students who’ve never been late to class before. Sign up for an art class, get an internship, DH, do whatever you can to avoid the stagnation of senior year.