We’re on the cusp of an anticipatory summer break that will, in no uncertain terms, signal the end of an era to the seniors of George Mason, so it’s inevitable that the twelfth graders here are occupied with a little introspection and a lot of reminiscing. I know that I’m certainly contemplating both what went right in my career as a high school student, not to mention and what went wrong. Because I’ve only been in Falls Church for a year, I can’t really dissect the “George Mason Experience” in its entirety, but I can say with some certainty that George Mason is not only a very accepting place for incoming students, but a dynamic place to finish up your secondary education.

A good part of high school is spent trying to find your “niche.” If you’re like me, that process was anything but easy. In ninth grade, my career as an athlete was quashed prematurely when I proved a liability to all the three junior varsity teams I was on. In tenth grade, I stuttered through a couple of debate tournaments before resigning; my debate partner teamed up with someone new and immediately started winning competitions. In eleventh grade the human rights club I tried to found fizzled due to my utter lack of motivational leadership skills (“Um, today, we’re going to write more protest letters. Anybody have a problem with that?). Why am I regaling you with tales of my failures? To reinforce my point that high school is about trying different things on: finding out what you like, what you’re bad at, and what you’d like to improve. Just looking through the course list or after-school activity roster indicates that George Mason enables that kind of self discovery in a great way.

I eventually realized that I liked writing; sadly, my career as a belabored IB student fried my brain to the point that I didn’t write half as often as I would have liked. I was lucky in that Lasso Online provided the perfect place for my articles, not to mention a vibrant forum for student expression and discussion.  And if there’s one thing I regret about my high school experience, it’s not my multitude of failures, which were all instructive in their own special ways, it’s that I was so burned out by trying to get good grades and get into a good college that I became a bit apathetic towards the end. Maybe the very nature of a rigorous high school program entails burn-out of some kind, but if that’s true then it’s also regrettable.

Anyway, for those who can do it all, I salute you. But for those who, like me, will find themselves prioritizing things that, in retrospect, seem unimportant (I could have written a novel in the time it took me to write a super-polished yet trite college essay) I’d urge you to figure out exactly what you need to do to satisfy your goals, grade-wise and college-wise, and do no more. I might have had a couple more B’s on my transcript if I’d followed this advice, but I also would have tried more new things, had more successes and failures. I realize that other seniors might be looking back on their high school years and thinking the exact opposite: that they wish they’d spent more time on their studies and absorbed more knowledge and wisdom from the great teachers here at George Mason. The only lesson that I can extract from that is that high school kids shouldn’t experience their four years passively, according to what friends or adults are doing or demanding. Rather, they should approach their education in all its forms with the vigor of self directed, self-motivated soon-to-be adults. George Mason, I think, is a superb place to do that.