To the underclassmen:

I'd like to take this opportunity to do two things. First, I want to completely rub it in your face that I'm graduating at the end of the month and you aren't, but more importantly the second thing I'd like to do is correct the completely absurd idea that senior year is going to be one big, long party with no work what so ever involved. You only wish it could be that easy.

I was just like you at the end of my junior year. I couldn't wait for senior year so I could just relax and take everything easy. You can imagine my shock when I had homework in all of my classes on the first day of school. It wasn't even the "here, take home this information sheet and fill it out and turn it in tomorrow" kind of homework. It was real involves-more-than-one-area-of-your-brain homework and it just didn't let up. Until the hurricane.

Things were less frantic after Rita, but no less demanding. Let's face it, after a natural disaster some things take a backseat and considering what everyone was putting up with on the home front, schoolwork came second. Things started building back up around Christmas and, once again, you can imagine my complete disgust at the fact that there was real homework even over the holidays.

"But I'm a senior," I kept thinking to myself. "Don't my teachers know that?" Turns out they did know that, and that was why they were doing it.

Don't get me wrong, senior year will be one of the best school years you'll ever have. Most of you will be turning 18 and get to daydream about what you're going to do for the rest of your life (and people will actually encourage it!), but during second semester things really start to get crazy. Holding down a normal high school schedule will get complicated because, contrary to popular belief you do work in the second semester and that's when a lot of projects start appearing. Add onto that any extra curricular activities like STARS or any spring sports and your schedule is packed. Taking AP tests? There goes some more of your time. Want to be on Prom Committee? Help with Bruin Babe? Work with your parents on Project Graduation stuff? Bye-bye free time. Just when it gets to the point where you feel like you just can't possibly do anything else the counselors hit you with a lovely not-so-little schedule of senior activities, most of them mandatory.

I know that if anyone told me I'd be this busy as a senior I would have laughed at them, but I am and I wish someone would have warned me because I wasn't prepared for this at all. You might be sitting there thinking something along the lines of "yeah, but at least you aren't going to be in high school next year." You're right, I won't. I'll be in a college lecture room with up to a possible 500 other people listening to a professor who may or may not be interesting and paying for my education while you're sitting in a classroom with 25 other people, still more or less getting a free education and taking notes from an overhead. That said, don't envy graduating seniors too much. We may be getting out of high school, but college is much more complicated.

As I get ready to end this, I have one final thing to say to all of you that's more personal than academic. If I learned anything at all this school year, it's that you can never in a million years predict what's going to happen. All of you know what's happened this year, so I don't have to mention it again, but I pray that none of your graduating classes have the same kind of senior year the class of 2006 had. While you're going through it, it may not seem like it, but these really are the best days of your lives so live them like they are and that way, no matter what happens, you'll never have any regrets.

Wishing the best for your futures,

Ashley