{"id":1139,"date":"2018-06-10T18:38:22","date_gmt":"2018-06-10T18:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/?p=1139"},"modified":"2018-07-25T18:39:28","modified_gmt":"2018-07-25T18:39:28","slug":"embrace-the-weird-and-unexpected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/2018\/06\/10\/embrace-the-weird-and-unexpected\/","title":{"rendered":"Embrace the \u201cWeird\u201d and Unexpected"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Shruti Sagar ’18<\/strong><\/h4>\n

A couple weeks ago, we had our final peer group meeting, and hidden in between a few different side conversations, I heard one of my peer groupies quietly ask how bad junior year really is. I started to talk to him about junior year a bit, and eventually all the side conversations died down and the whole group started to listen. I crave order more than anyone else I know, so I couldn\u2019t just explain junior year without giving them my perspective on the rest of high school. I did just that\u2014I sat down for around twenty minutes and took eight freshmen through my high school experience. I let myself be extremely vulnerable, which is probably why I remember none of what I said, except for what I said about senior year. I told them that above everything else, senior year is the year you realize things. <\/span><\/p>\n

I think high school is one of the strangest concepts in the world. You enter as a scrawny but bright-eyed fourteen-year-old and you graduate as an adult, and the amount of experiences, opportunities, memories, and failures that happen in between those two milestones are so much more concentrated than those that people have prior to life before their first day of high school. Movies and TV shows paint high school as some sort of a quintessential coming-of-age experience full of drama, locker decorations, football games, and boring classes. The problem with that depiction is that a typical high school experience doesn\u2019t actually exist. These fictional adaptations often forget to include the long nights where you can hardly keep your eyes open, the moments that you think are going to break you, or the unexplainable weight that comes from carrying constant stress. In other words, stereotypes of the high school experience often forget about the hardships because it makes the experience sound less frightening and more enticing, but I have realized that it is out of difficult times that a person grows, and how a person handles hardship says more about their character than any big win, good grade, or prom date ever could. <\/span><\/p>\n

Pingry can be the worst sometimes. The rigorous environment we create for each other results in so many of these hardships in the first place because so many of us think that we need to be on top in every sense of the word\u2014that we need to create that nonexistent \u201chigh school experience\u201d for ourselves. For me, the college process was such a slap in the face because it made me realize how much is out of our control and that \u201cnormal\u201d truly does not exist. So many Pingry students, myself included, push ourselves to beyond our maximum because we believe that every failure or success we experience is our responsibility, when in reality, it\u2019s all just a part of life. <\/span><\/p>\n

I mean it when I say that I\u2019m nothing but grateful I didn\u2019t get into the college I applied to early. Sure, it meant months of waiting, agonizing, and hoping, but more than all that, it made me step back, look at the bigger picture, and recognize that if being deferred from an incredible school was something to cry about, then my life is nothing but a blessing. It made me realize that when all is said and done, when I\u2019m going through the motions of my freshman year of college, I\u2019m not going to remember the statistics of the schools I applied to or the results I got from each, but rather the people who stood by my side\u2014the ones who listened to me for hours and the ones that I listened to for hours. I became close this year with incredible people for several reasons, and a big one was because I didn\u2019t get into college. I learned to check in on others, to put situations into perspective, and most importantly, to recognize that my life isn\u2019t supposed to be a movie. We\u2019re going to mess up, or life is going to mess <\/span>us <\/span><\/i>up, but it is how we emerge from these situations, and more importantly, how we support our peers and help others stay afloat that speaks to the way we carry ourselves.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now that I\u2019ve ended a paragraph I started with \u201cPingry can be the worst,\u201d I think it\u2019s only fair I address how this school has shaped my character and influenced me for the better. In the first few lines of Jack Garratt\u2019s song \u201cSurprise Yourself,\u201d he sings: \u201cSpeak and open up your mind\/It’s something you should do all the time\/Keep exploring, seek and find\/You know you might surprise yourself.\u201d I promised myself I would try not to be tacky, but here I am quoting song lyrics, so I think I\u2019ll just keep going with that theme. <\/span><\/p>\n

Like I said before, I openly think high school is the weirdest concept ever, and I will never understand it. I always tell people that I don\u2019t necessarily think high school is the place I am meant to \u201cthrive,\u201d but at the same time, I\u2019m incredibly grateful for Pingry and all the opportunities and experiences that came with it. I\u2019ll miss it so much because of the little things. I\u2019ll miss the fact that I\u2019ve slept in a tent on Pingry\u2019s campus multiple times, that teachers want to have genuine conversations about things that actually matter and don\u2019t discount your opinion, and that I can walk anywhere in the school at any time and find someone who wants to have a conversation. I\u2019ll miss the field hockey team, peer leadership, and my IRT group\u2014all groups of people brought together by common interests yet bonded together by so much more than just an extracurricular. <\/span><\/p>\n

I encourage any underclassmen reading this to think about the lyrics I quoted above. The little things that make me love Pingry so much became such big parts of my life, but that wouldn\u2019t have been possible if I didn\u2019t learn to approach conversations with an open mind, get to know as many people as I can, and most importantly, listen to what other people have to say. I\u2019ve realized that by doing so, I have, in fact, surprised myself\u2014and I know this because, again, senior year is the year you realize things. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Shruti Sagar ’18 A couple weeks ago, we had our final peer group meeting, and hidden in between a few different side conversations, I heard one of my peer groupies quietly ask how bad junior year really is. I started to talk to him about junior year a bit, and eventually all the side […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":569,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,94],"tags":[13,96,95],"class_list":["post-1139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","category-senior-reflections","tag-opinion","tag-senior-reflection","tag-senior-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1140,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139\/revisions\/1140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.pingry.org\/record\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}