One of the hardest choices you’ll make in your life is what your plan is after graduating high school. You’ve only known school for the past 14+ years, spending 6 hours everyday working on different papers, persevering through challenging classes, and now needing to make a huge, possibly life changing decision, on what you want to do with your life. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve spent sitting in my room completely lost in thought trying to figure out what I want to make of my life, and how I can possibly get there. I would always push it off, telling myself to just stop stressing and that I still had so much time to figure it out, but then about a month ago, I realized that the time had practically run out, and it was time to actually figure out my life (or at least my plans for next year). 

On top of this decision being hard enough to make alone, adding in the Covid factor, which seems to have made a lot of us much too comfortable sitting at home doing nothing, has made it even harder. Us seniors haven’t had the past year and a half to talk to each other in person, tour colleges, talk to advisors, or to shadow people in careers we might be interested in pursuing. Overall, we all kind of missed out on the normal ¨preparing for college¨ scenarios that we would have been given if it weren’t for the pandemic. For me personally, I have gotten so accustomed to sitting in bed on my computer, and getting stuck in the same routine everyday, that the idea of moving far away from home into a whole new environment, starting a new school (especially college-ahh!), and overall learning how to be independent and self-reliant scares the crap out of me. 

 We are hoping this article can be helpful for sophomores and juniors to be able to see the different possibilities there are after high school, along with maybe giving them some comfort in the fact that most of us are still figuring things out, and don’t have our entire lives planned out yet.  To do so, we thought that it would be nice for the Community School seniors to be able to reflect upon our senior year once we are older and be able to see how different (or similar) our lives have turned out to be than what we had envisioned. With that being said, we decided to ask the graduating class of 2021 Comm school seniors to answer these following ten questions about what they hope the next couple years will look like for them:

1. Are you planning on going to college? 
2. Are you planning on moving out of the area?
3. What’s your plan for next year in general?
4. Are you going to be working towards any specific career or goal? 
5. If you do have a specific career in mind, what have you done to prepare for it over the past 17+ years?  Have certain things affected your decision?
6. Are you planning on living on your own?
7. Do you plan on having a job?
8. Why are you choosing to take this path in life?
9. What are you most excited about in this new journey? 
10. Do you feel prepared?

Meadow: I’m planning on moving to Santa Cruz with Natalia and my boyfriend this year to attend Cabrillo Community College. Hopefully after this next year, I will have a better idea of what I’d like to do with my life and get a better idea for a major. My goal is to experience new things, get a job finally, and start experimenting with things that could interest me. I know I’d like to take a class on ethics or Philosophy because those are things that interest me. I’m also really excited to take some sort of culinary class as well as a yoga class. Hopefully after a year or two in Santa Cruz, I’ll be able to move to Hawaii and attend a college there or at least start traveling around the world and see as many things as I can. I didn’t prepare that much unfortunately for this new step, but the past couple months, I’ve been preparing myself more for this journey.  I’m most excited to learn how to be independent and to experience new things and meet new people outside of this town.

Natalia :  I am planning on moving down to the Santa Cruz area with meadow and another friend to attend Cabrillo community college this summer,  for a year or two. While we’re down there, I’m hoping to get a job and save enough money to either move to hawaii or travel for a few years after (while still attending either an online college or a college in Hawaii). Honestly, I have no idea what I want to major in yet (i’m a super indecisive person), but I am interested in classes along the lines of psychology, cooking, or art. If I was smart I would have done some sort of planning and preparation for this next chapter, butttttt I didnt. I’m choosing to take this new path in life for one because I know if I stay in Mendo I probably wont ever leave and for two because I wanna see something new and have new experiences. 

Savion: I’m thinking I might go to college for Geology or Paleontology, but I’m not sure yet. I certainly am moving out of the area, but I’m going to wait a little and save up some money. My plan for the next year or so is to work as constantly as I can and save up as much money as I can. I’d like to have a specific goal, but I don’t. I’ve been too indecisive over the course of my life to have really prepared for a career. I am definitely going to live away from my parents, but hopefully not alone. I plan on having at least two jobs if I can help it. I’m choosing this path because I’m stubborn and incapable of making a good life decision. I’m excited to finally be free to make my own decisions, even if they do end up being bad ones. In some ways I feel prepared, but in most I know I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.

Pele: I do want to go to college at some point to study either mycology, neuroscience, or psychology, but I’m not sure yet exactly where I want to attend school. I am hoping to move out of the area, but after I get a job and save up some money, which is honestly my main goal at the moment, since I would like to travel at some point. I picture that within the next year I will get a good paying job, hopefully go on some sort of biking tour, and just experience new things, outside my comfort zone.

Indigo: After highschool, my immediate plan is to take a year off and earn enough money to support myself. But besides that, my post high school plan is to go to community college, either SBCC or SRJC, and then transfer to a university for architecture. But, who knows what is going to happen. 

Overall as you can see, we are all just beginning to figure out our lives. Although this year has thrown so many obstacles at us and made it harder to even imagine our futures, we’ve done what we can to plan out our next steps in life, whether it be taking a gap year, attending a community college, heading straight into a University, or not even going to college and just doing what we want to do, and hopefully we’ve made the right decisions for ourselves… we’ll see;). There are still so many unknowns and room for doubt in our futures, but this is just the beginning for all of us.