memories in high school essay

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Guys, I'm writing my personal essay for college apps and planning to write about high school experiences. But I'm not sure which ones are worth mentioning. Any thoughts on what aspects of high school will colleges find relatable or intriguing?

When selecting a high school experience to write about for your personal essay, look for something that resulted in personal growth or change. This could be an event, a personal project, an interaction with someone who influenced you, or even a specific class or lesson that had a profound impact on your perspective. It's crucial to select a topic that not only intrigues the admissions officers but also offers a unique snapshot of who you are as an individual.

While most students often choose to write about achievement milestones, wins, and leadership roles, it might be more effective to opt for a moment where you faced a challenge, made a mistake, or learned something valuable. This could be a failed experiment in your science class that piqued your curiosity, or a challenging book in your literature class that opened up new perspectives. Remember, the topic you choose should essentially showcase your individuality, curiosity, resilience, or leadership qualities — all factors highly valued by colleges.

Admissions officers read lots of essays about high school experiences, so they appreciate reading about unique experiences, like an unexpected friendship, a hobby you developed in high school, or a part-time job that taught you about responsibility. This will make your essay stand out from others that might be based on more common themes.

Lastly, don't forget the purpose of this essay - to give admissions officers a sense of who you are and what you’ll bring to their campus. So whatever experience you choose to write about, make sure it reflects your values, skills, and qualities that you believe will add value to the university community.

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The La Salle Falconer

The high school experience: a personal reflection.

Filled with growth and life lessons, the high school experience has been a journey worth the climb.

Anna Waldron , Editor May 4, 2022

High school is arguably the most transformative time of a person’s life. My own experience has been filled with more memories, laughter, stress, and — most importantly, growth — than I ever could have anticipated when I began. 

The lessons I have learned about myself, about others, and about the world in the last four years have shaped who I am today, and that person is far from the naive 14-year-old girl who walked through those glass doors of La Salle nearly four years ago. I was oblivious to the overwhelming emotional distress that I would feel when I started high school. 

In some ways, it feels like an everyday battle. 

As a freshman, the struggle began with adjusting to what felt like a whole new world. I was desperately trying to make friends, considering I had only one. I never knew what it was like to feel alone in a school with so many people. I felt like I had to act a certain way or be a certain person in order to maintain a basic conversation with people in my classes or on my soccer team. 

Every day, my head was filled with an overwhelming concern about how I could manage to make myself look like someone with more friends than I actually had at the time. 

I remember constantly thinking, “I’ll start enjoying this at some point, right?” 

The truth is, I did. 

To anyone who is feeling the way I once felt, please know that those feelings do go away. By the end of my freshman year and into the next, I enjoyed myself. School wasn’t particularly challenging, and I was spending my weekends having fun with my friends and going to basketball games and sleepovers. I had finally created a routine and felt mostly content with my life, aside from daunting thoughts in my head telling me it was all a lie.

I think that’s something that all teenagers deal with. It comes with the age, the questions, “do my friends actually like me?” or “am I enough?” — “do people worry about me or have I tricked myself into thinking they do?” 

I continued to move throughout my sophomore year feeling a new level of comfort with my life. Then, the pandemic hit. 

The original two weeks of quarantine turned into two months, and then two years. The predictable high school experience I had become accustomed to was no longer my reality, and instead, high school turned into an atypical rollercoaster of isolation from all the essential parts of the experience. 

To say it was hard would be an understatement, but after the initial forced adjustment to a remote life, I was forced to be content without relying on others.

Without having to fear other people’s judgments of me or having to conceal myself in social situations to appear more “acceptable,” I gained independence and confidence within myself that I didn’t know existed.

Then finally — after over a year — the long-awaited return to school arrived. 

I rejoiced in my ability to thrive academically again and I was so relieved to feel like I was really learning. I reconnected with my friends, ate lunch outside, took finals, and then — after a blur of two months — the year ended. My junior year flew by like no other. 

When senior year rolled around, I felt out of place. I couldn’t imagine a world where I belonged to the oldest class at the school. In the beginning, it was odd getting used to, but after a few weeks, it was nothing but a thrill as I planned what the next weekend alongside my friends would hold. 

My friendships were flourishing and I was becoming closer and closer with people I had never really gotten to know. 

Unlike the three years prior, my senior year has felt like a stereotypical high school experience, and I could not be more grateful for it. 

I always thought of myself as someone who was above enjoying things like attending soccer games, getting ready for homecoming with my friends, singing karaoke in someone’s basement, or going to a trampoline park for an 18-year-old’s birthday party. 

The truth is, I’m not. 

I regret that I spent so long depriving myself of the things I love in order to fit a narrative that I created for myself. 

I love that I will graduate high school happier and more fulfilled than I ever felt during my other three years here. It feels like everything has finally come full circle, after all these years of feeling so alone. 

So yes, it was transformative. I am finally content with the person I have become and the life I have chosen to lead. I wouldn’t be the same without La Salle and I wouldn’t be the same without the people I’ve gotten to know here. 

I know that I will look back on my high school experience here, not feeling critical of the insecurities I have felt, but feeling grateful for the memories and lessons that came regardless of them. 

Senior Anna Waldron has lived in Portland, Oregon her whole life, in the same neighborhood as nine members of her extended family.  Outside of The...

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Making Memories: Why the Things You Remember About High School Will Surprise You

Senior year of high school is a busy time to be a teenager, even aside from the work you’ll put into applying to college. It’s also full of events that are specifically designed to serve as capstones for your high school experience, like prom and graduation. As you reach the end of the year, these events will come on thick and fast.

You may find that these senior events are a lot of fun and a chance to end high school on a high note. However, you might also find yourself worrying about whether you’re doing the right things to enjoy these events properly. After all, you’re supposed to remember these milestones for the rest of your life, right?

Not always. The memories you really treasure from high school may come from unexpected places, and some of the best memories won’t be formed in scheduled, traditional events. You never know which experiences will shape, inspire, or affect you in retrospect. As someone who’s been out of high school for over a decade, here’s what I’ve learned about memories, formative experiences, and the pressure to enjoy traditional graduation-related events.

There’s a Last Time for Everything

If you haven’t watched older friends or siblings experience their senior year of high school—or maybe even if you have—you might be surprised at just how unrelenting the senior year event parade really is. All those activities and accolades you’ve accumulated, which have helped to make you a competitive college applicant, will only make your schedule more packed with award ceremonies, end-of-year banquets, and other commemorative events.

Towards the end of the year, you might attend prom, senior ceremonies, or other special events with the rest of your class. Then, of course, there’s commencement itself, with special outfits to wear and proud family photos to take, and perhaps graduation parties to attend afterward.

There are also lots of “lasts” to consider—your last performance in the marching band, your last class with a favorite teacher, your last chance at qualifying for the state tournament in your varsity sport, and so on. These might be set up to include special recognition for seniors like you who will be moving on to college.

These events are enjoyable for a lot of students, just as they’re meant to be. However, that tradition of enjoyment can actually make you feel pressured to have a good time and create a memory you’ll treasure for the rest of your life. Sometimes, that’s not what actually happens.

Academic ceremonies aren’t a fun experience for everyone. (Personally, listening to graduation speeches is one of my least favorite activities on earth.) Social events like prom can be less than magical if you’re shy, introverted, or have trouble with friends, or if you simply don’t enjoy dressing up and dancing awkwardly with your entire high school class.

And what if something unexpected interrupts your plans? What if you come down with mono and spend your last weeks of senior year stuck in bed? You might feel like your life—or at least your opportunity to create the treasured memories of high school you’re seeking—is absolutely ruined.

Fortunately, even if unforeseen circumstances intervene to prevent you from participating in the traditional slate of senior events, it’s really, truly not the end of the world. These events can be fun and make you feel like your hard work has been appreciated, or they can be less than enjoyable, but either way, they’re only a very small portion of your overall high school experience.

You’ll have (and you’ve already had) innumerable opportunities to make amazing memories every single day, and these more quotidian memories matter too. In fact, you might very well find that the experiences that stick with you most or become most important to you spring from unexpected sources, not from the events that are intended to produce lasting memories.

The Limitations of Foresight

I’ve been out of high school for a while now, and in my experience, it’s impossible to tell at the time what events and feelings will linger in your memory. You never really know which experiences will change and shape you as you become an adult. However, I’ve noticed a few trends of high school experiences that have turned into treasured memories or windows into who I am.

When I think back on my high school experiences, the things that I still remember clearly and that I know affected me deeply are definitely not the events where I felt pressured to make lasting memories. I barely recall those events; they exist only as stressful blurs in my recollection. Instead, I remember most vividly the experiences that seemed ordinary at the time, but were most closely linked to the people and ideas that made me who I am today.

I remember the hilarious video we made in my tenth grade Spanish class, featuring a painting from our school’s hallway coming to life and terrorizing the (remarkably game) assistant principal. I remember the road trip my dad and I took to visit colleges, one of the first times I ever left my home state, and the way it expanded my world and made a whole new range of possible futures suddenly seem real.

I remember first loves and late-night phone calls, making mischief with my siblings, and diving deep into academic and extracurricular projects that I really cared about. I remember sneaking up on my favorite teacher to surprise her with the news that I’d been accepted to my dream college. I remember momentous arguments with my parents on issues that, long afterward, they thanked me for challenging their positions on. These are the things that have stuck with me.

For some of these experiences, it’s taken me years to see how truly special they were. For others, their ordinariness is exactly the point. The most formative influences of my childhood built up bit by bit, day by day; they didn’t touch my life in one magical moment.

Most of all, I remember events, places, and people that are me-specific. Those are the things that best reflect my life, my circumstances, and what matters (or mattered) most to me. I don’t remember the events that were based on someone else’s idea of what high school students could do; I remember what is and was most personally important to me as a unique person.

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Making Memories that Matter to You

So what happens next? What can I do during high school, you might ask, to make sure that I built up a stock of experiences and memories that will really matter to me later in my life?

Well, to some extent, there’s nothing you can do to be sure. There’s no one right way to spend your high school years, and there’s no way to make absolutely certain that you have a perfect experience that’s full of magical memories. Life tends to resist our attempts to make it fit a certain pattern or schedule.

Besides, your college years will be a time of immense change; you’ll be learning new things every day, in the classroom and outside of it. You never know exactly who you’ll be on the other end of that experience, and it’s hard to say what memories Future You will consider especially important. Besides, this process of growth can be, by definition, stressful and challenging.

One piece of advice I would give is to stay open to whatever experiences come your way. Do silly things with your friends. Have long, impromptu conversations. Turn right where you would usually turn left, and see where it takes you. You can plan and schedule all you like, but some of your best memories will come from coincidences and chance meetings.

Allow yourself to fully experience the moment you’re living in, whatever that involves, rather than worrying about whether it meets some arbitrary standard for “good” high school memories. FOMO, or fear of missing out, is very real and can hurt your ability to enjoy the moment. If you spend all your time worrying that you’re not doing what a high school senior is “supposed” to do, all you’ll have to remember will be that experience of worry.

When it comes to choosing how to spend your time during your senior year, be true to yourself. If you’re absolutely sure that the traditional senior year activities that are popular where you live will be more boring or stressful for you than enjoyable or meaningful, don’t feel bad about opting out of some of them.

Some events, like your graduation ceremony itself, may be unavoidable, and your parents will inevitably get a say—this is a big moment for them as well. However, you don’t have to do everything to celebrate or commemorate your senior year.

One of the greatest things about growing older is that you get more of a say in deciding which traditions or practices are truly meaningful for you. You don’t have to do things just because they’re popular or socially expected. Even when you do observe long-standing traditions, you’re free to put your own spin on them.

If you’re feeling stressed about the pressure to do and enjoy things that just aren’t for you, don’t force it. Focus instead on the things that really make you happy and the kinds of memories that you want to make. Though it might seem paradoxical, the best way to build up great memories is to stop worrying so much about doing the correct things to build up great memories, and instead, to fully appreciate whatever comes your way—especially the unexpected.

I, for one, prefer to look back fondly on the unrehearsed, unscheduled, and personally significant things I did in high school. Those memories may not represent anyone else’s idea of a perfect high school experience, but those are also the moments, places, and people that truly made me who I am today. For that, I’m grateful.

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My High School Experience and Growth

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Published: Aug 1, 2024

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The academic dimension, the social dimension, the personal dimension.

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Adolescence

Why high school stays with you forever (like it or not), the psychology and biology that makes teen stress so memorable..

Posted July 27, 2015

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The English Romantic Poet Robert Southey believed that “The first 20 years are the longest half of your life, no matter how long you might live.”

Memory researchers have in fact identified something called " The Reminiscence Bump ," which confirms that the strongest memories for the events in our lives come from things that happened to us between the ages of 10 and 30.

Why the High School Years are Special

For many people, the most vividly remembered and emotionally charged of those years are spent in high school. Unrequited romantic crushes; chronic embarrassment ; desperate struggles for popularity; sexual awakening; parental pressure. And above all else, competition : social, athletic, academic, and otherwise. The angst of these years follows us through life, and the conflicted feelings so many of us harbor about high school fuel the popularity of TV shows and movies like Beverly Hills 90210 , Mean Girls, Heathers, The Breakfast Club, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High , to name just a few.

What is it about this time of life that makes it stand out from the rest of our years? Part of it is undoubtedly due to changes in the brain's sensitivity to certain types of information during adolescence , but this is not the whole story.

For some of us, high school shines like an enchanted kingdom compared to which every other stage of life falls short. [ See one of my earlier blogs about “ happiness ” that may partially explain this. ] For others, it is remembered as an endless Hell of daily torments. For most of us, it is something in between, but emotional nonetheless. And strong emotions equal strong memories; even the music from those years gets imprinted on our brain like nothing that comes later.

I believe that many factors interact to make our teenage memories so vivid, but it is primarily the collision between the evolved psychological mechanisms needed for success in our ancestral hunter-gatherer world and the modern institution of the high school that is responsible.

Evolution & the Teen Years

As far as scientists can tell, our prehistoric forebears lived in relatively small groups where they knew everyone else in a face-to-face, long-term way. Most people would live out their entire life in this group, and one’s social standing within it was determined early on – during adolescence .

How much one was admired as a warrior or hunter, how desirable one was perceived to be as a mate, and how much trust and esteem was accorded to one by others—all was sorted out in young adulthood. A person deemed to be a loser at 18 was unlikely to rise to a position of prominence at 40. Thus, from an evolutionary perspective, the competition of the teen years was in fact a life-and-death affair.

In our modern world, one can of course move off to new places after graduation and start over.

However, even though we may be consciously aware of this (to the extent that we are consciously aware of anything when we are teenagers), the psychological buttons that get pushed in the adolescent brain make the importance of our social lives override everything else. Popularity with peer groups can become an obsession, since it is the people in your own age cohort against whom you will be ranked forever. After all, your adult status primarily depends upon how you stack up compared to them, not to others.

Also, strong conformity pressures insure that you do not stray too far from the group’s values; ostracism from the group in prehistoric times was tantamount to a death sentence. One's teenage self strives to cement inclusion in the group at all costs. Further, one needs to be able to forge alliances with others and demonstrate loyalty to these individuals, resulting in a splintering of the social world into competing cliques that grind each other up in the gears of the social hierarchy.

Conflict with parents is usually inevitable at this time. Parents are vitally concerned with their children’s success, but their perspective is usually more long-term compared to the teen's. So, the things that the parent thinks that the child should be concerned with and the things that the child is emotionally driven to actually be concerned with are often quite different. How the high-schooler chooses to spend leisure time, and whom he or she chooses to date or hang out with, can become a real minefield.

Hormones fuel the “showing off” of qualities that would have increased one’s market value in early societies. In young men, we still reward to some extent the things that would have been essential for success in hunting and combat—the willingness to take risks, and skills such as fighting ability, running fast, clubbing things, and throwing things with velocity and accuracy. For young women, the advertisement of youth and fertility through all of the usual standards of beauty becomes a significant criterion by which they are judged.

Our Cognitive Biases

A related social skill that would have had a big payoff in earlier times is the ability to remember details about the temperament, predictability, and past behavior of individuals who were personally known to you; there would have been little use for a mind designed to engage in abstract statistical thinking about large numbers of unknown outsiders.

In today’s world, it is advantageous to be able to think in terms of probabilities and percentages when it comes to people, because predicting the behavior of the strangers we deal with in everyday life requires that we do so. This task is difficult for many of us because the early wiring of the brain was guided by different needs. Thus, natural selection shaped a thirst for, and a memory to store information about, specific people. We needed to remember who treated us well and who did not—the more emotional the memory, the less likely we are to forget it. This strong propensity for holding grudges protects us from being taken advantage of again, but can also make for some uncomfortable, anxiety -arousing moments at high school reunions.

To further complicate things, high school is probably the last time in life when people of all sorts are thrown together for no other reason than they are the same age and live in the same area.

Yes, high schools are often segregated by economic background and race, but for many there is still more of a mix in day-to-day life than they will encounter later. After high school, people begin to sort themselves out according to intelligence , political values, occupational interests, and a wide range of other social screening devices.

At the same time, however, the people you knew in high school remain your default group for engaging in social comparison precisely because they are the same age as you and because they started out in the same place, so there is typically a degree of interest in finding out what happened to them later in life if for no other reason than to help you figure out your feelings about your own life.

So, knowing all this, are you looking forward to your next high school reunion —or not ?

Frank McAndrew, Ph.D., is the Cornelia H. Dudley Professor of Psychology at Knox College.

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