Why I’m Starting My Senior Project Early, and Why You Should Too!

Taylor LaMonica, Writer

Being a junior in high school is a big deal. An overload of work and trying to figure out what you want to go to college for hangs over your head for the months of being in school. I have always had an idea of what I wanted to be when I get older because I have always loved kids and wanted to help make an impact on someone’s life. This means my childhood dream job has always been a teacher, but I’m not the best of students so procrastination has been my name since elementary school. I created bad habits of waiting last minute to do work and on big projects so college was in the back of my head as well as my senior year.

 

Recently my older sister, who I look up to, showed me that finishing high school and going to college can greatly help me have a good future with my life. She showed me new future careers and fell in love with this idea of social work. My new dream job is to help kids and make their lives better by being a DHS worker or even by joining the police force. Because I started looking up to my future and pushing myself in school, I had several opportunities to help kids with volunteer work. This gave me the great idea to start my senior project early and start helping kids now.

 

To start helping myself get ready for my senior project I knew I needed to start working with kids to get my patience and understandings in order. Working with kids is a big deal because they are so full of life and need great people to look up to. Kids are a breed of their own and working with them takes a little extra life in someone. Knowing this, I asked my dad if I could help him coach his little league softball team. This was the perfect opportunity to put everything in order to understand kids even more. I spent months coaching the kids that they became a huge part of my heart and I knew this was what I wanted to continue. I had spoken to my dad and he thought it would be a great idea to do my senior project with kids.

 

Being a Junior and seeing that the seniors were doing there senior projects made me realize I need to start this now or I know I will procrastinate with senioritis. I had spoken to handfuls of seniors to see what I needed to do and thought this was perfect for me. All the seniors told me that starting early will make life a hundred times easier, so you shouldn’t wait until the last minute to do a huge project that determines if you graduate or not. This will bring so much stress off my shoulders in the long run. I started talking to more and more people and found out I will be doing a youth softball camp and started doing the paperwork to do it over the summer. My teachers even told me this was the best thing to do!

 

As a struggling Junior who procrastinates a lot — and I know many more students are like that too — I would say to start your senior project as soon as you can! It just took so much stress off my shoulders that I would have had my senior year. Starting early will give you enough time to fully enjoy your project experience and give you so much more time to make sure everything is done right and too your full potential. Even if you don’t know what to do or are lost with future goals even brainstorming ideas now will help you a lot in your future!