Published in The Mystician 84.6, Page 10
Ever since the day of my high school graduation, I have had a rocky relationship with my sense of motivation when it comes to achieving my goals. Like most high school students, I have suffered from senioritis since the end of my junior year, which intensified during the quarantine in the spring of 2020.
Defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, senioritis is the “ebbing of motivation and effort by school seniors as evidenced by tardiness, absences and lower grades.”
When I was in high school, a lot of motivation for doing well in my classes was b ased on my grades and the consequences that came with failure. For the longest time, this was a satisfactory method for appeasing my teachers and parents, but I should've known this wasn’t going to last in the future.
While I was able to achieve satisfactory grades—bar the quarter spent online at the start of the pandemic when my grades took a nosedive—I never felt satisfied with my work.
In hindsight, this time of my life reminds me of a Machiavelli quote from English class that I unconsciously took to heart: "It is better to be feared than to be loved, if one cannot be both." If I were not to love a class, I thought it would be a better idea to use the fear of the numbers on my report card and the disappointment from my authority figures as a motivating leader to complete my homework.
When it came to said classes, I did not care whether I would forget or remember anything I learned. The main thing that mattered was retaining the information long enough to pass the exams.
When I graduated from high school and transitioned to college, I felt a sudden shift in my perspective and the expectations placed on me . While it was recommended by everybody to attend college, the degree I took was my choice. With my specific degree, I was not required to take many general classes, and with the generals I had to take, I had options to fill my requirements.
Although I am now free of parental and teacher expectations, I have a shifting balance of my own expectations—pushing myself too hard or being too lax.
Throughout my two years in college, there were times when I put too much effort into a class that turned out to be easy and other times, when I did not put enough effort into my work, and it affected my grades in a negative way.
For example, I took a photography class in my first semester where all I had to do was take some photos according to the requirements such as having them angled properly or making sure to take photos staying in one spot. This normally led me to overstress about the details of the photos and feeling that they were inadequate.In reality, my pictures were completely fine, and I worried for nothing, wasting my own energy.
Another semester, I had an online class that I forgot to do until the very last minute. Because of the lack of a classroom environment, I normally did not realize the work existed until I checked on Blackboard. I fell into a habit from high school where I didn’t do my work until someone told me or it affected my grade.
“Where do I go from here?” This is a question I have asked myself daily for the past couple years. While I no longer have senioritis in its most intense form, I still feel the lingering effects to this day in my sophomore year of college.
Similar to the long term effects of COVID, when I was finally given my freedom after graduation, I had no idea what to do with it, so I just kept following their suggestions even if they were not what I truly wanted because I was scared of thinking otherwise.
Now in my last semester at Bismarck state college, I have the experience of making decisions of what I want to do. As I transfer to another college to complete my bachelor’s degree, I am better prepared for the mental hurdles of responsibility on the path to independence.
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