Senior Reflection: Carina Taufiq

Walking in as a freshman, I had a whole different perspective of the High School then I do now. Everything and everyone seemed bigger and more intimidating. Now that I have four years of High School under my belt, I can officially step back and see things from a more realistic perspective. High School wasn’t as intimidating as my Elementary and Middle School teachers lead me to believe. When my first day of High School finally rolled around I was shaking, worried that I would be a typical freshman. Turns out I was; I got lost, mixed up my teachers names and forgot paper and a pencil all in one day. Now when I look back at that day I can laugh at how naive I was.

As the school year went on I realized that High School wasn’t as hard as I was expecting. When you watch movies about High School students, they have homework that keeps them up all night, every night. Even though I personally have pulled a few all-nighters, it’s not the extreme I associated High School with when I was younger. My sophomore and junior year sort of melted together and I can’t differentiate them. But now that I’m in my senior year, I can see how I still have my best days ahead of me. I was shy in my first three years of High School, so I never really had a chance to meet many people. Even with a small social group I couldn’t have asked for better friends.

Senior year is all about planning for the future, even though I have no idea what I want to do or where I want to go, so I’ve decided to take a gap year. I looked through all the programs they offer for gap years and realised that they either didn’t really offer what I was interested in or were too complicated to apply for. With that in mind, I figured that I could just create my own gap year and do what I truly want to do, instead of sticking to a program. I hope to work, take some art classes and backpack through Europe, specifically the Icelandic region. After my gap year, however, I plan on attending a college that allows me to pursue some sort of career in art.

Even though my future isn’t completely planned, my High School career definitely provided me with the building blocks I needed, and I know that in the future, even if I do not yet know what I want to do, I will end up doing something that I love, and that inspires me and hopefully others.