Breaking down the deadly disease of the senior class

By Victor Xie

Forget the flu! There’s another disease that’s taking the senior class by storm: senioritis.

If you don’t know if you have senioritis or not, here’s a list of expected symptoms you may experience:

• Doing homework the day it’s due
• Not doing homework at all
• Saying, “I can do it tomorrow”
• Saying, “I got this in the bag” without studying for the test
• Not realizing anything is due
• Feeling like nothing in school matters anymore

When I was a freshman and seniors told me, “I have massive senioritis,” I never understood why anyone could stop caring about school. More importantly, I never understood how anyone could stop working for something they’ve been working towards for almost four years.

Well, here I am, a senior, suffering from massive and crippling senioritis.

I never thought I would catch it. Looking back, I feel like freshman-me was much more driven and ambitious. I wanted to get straight A’s, get positions in clubs and do everything possible that would look good on college applications. Now as a senior, I think I’ve kind of accepted that it’s too late to chase those ambitions, and that’s probably what causes my senioritis.

I think what really bugs me is that people don’t really understand why some of us seniors catch senioritis in the first place. I just survived probably the worst year of my life: junior year. And now I’m being told to keep working, studying, writing and calculating with no assurance whatsoever that it will ever pay off. With college applications submitted, I’m simply waiting for judgement day. Senior year just seems like an excessive waiting line that determines my future.

If I could go back in time and tell my early senior-self not to catch senioritis, I don’t think I would. I think my senioritis is pretty justified; I’ve worked hard and now I’m burnt out.

I do homework in third period. I go home and take naps. I procrastinate on five-page research papers. These are bad habits I never did until senior year (surprisingly) and never thought I’d normalize. I guess my senioritis isn’t as bad as others that I’ve witnessed, but nonetheless I never thought I’d catch such a deadly disease.

Now, getting out of this pit hole of feeling endlessly unmotivated is going to be hard; probably impossible at this point. But I guess I’ll try. In second semester.

To the underclassmen: watch out. Senioritis gets the best of everyone.