(A Note from an Old IT Guy Who Barely Graduated)
School is beginning again here in Colorado. Teachers, staff, and students are starting to show up sparsely, the halls still quiet but already carrying that familiar first-week energy. And as I watch it all begin to stir, this comes to mind.
I work in a high school now. I’m the IT guy. Most days I’m fixing Chromebooks, resetting passwords, or chasing down a printer that decided it doesn’t like Mondays. But every once in a while I look up from a help desk ticket and watch the kids moving through the halls, and something older rises up in me.
I graduated high school in 1974, but just barely. I detested school. I loathed it. By my senior year it was already lost to me — I’d spent the first three years doing almost nothing, and the result was that I couldn’t wait to get out. Some days I’d leave around ten in the morning and head straight for the beach to surf. Looking back, I wish I had done it differently. Freshman year especially. That was the year the tone got set, and I set it wrong.
A few years later, in 1978, I joined the Navy and ended up on submarines. That meant long stretches at sea, a lot of time alone with my thoughts, and years of quiet in which life had a chance to settle and show me what actually mattered. I’ve been thinking about those high school years more as I’ve gotten older. And one realization keeps coming back, clearer every time: in the whole high school experience, two years stand out more than the others. Your freshman year. And your senior year.
Whatever you build in ninth grade is, more often than not, the foundation you’re still standing on when you walk across that stage four years later. If freshman year feels miserable, lonely, or like something you’re just enduring, school tends to stay that way. You learn to dislike it. You count the days. You leave with a diploma and a lot of memories you’d rather forget. But if freshman year feels open, if you find even a few things that light you up, the rest of high school has a much better chance of becoming something you’ll look back on with real warmth.
Sophomore and junior year? For most of us they’re a blur. Necessary, important in their own way, but they don’t carry the same weight. Freshman year is when the tone gets set. Senior year is when you feel the full result of that tone.
So here’s the simple thing I wish someone had told me at fourteen or fifteen: make your freshman year a great year. Not perfect. Just deliberately good.
Go to the dances even if you feel awkward. Try out for the play or sit in the audience and cheer loud. Join a team or show up to the games and make noise. Find the one or two things that actually pull at you—art, robotics, choir, the outdoor club, whatever it is—and lean into them. Be happy on purpose. Have a blast when you can.
You don’t have to be the star. You just have to show up and let yourself enjoy it. Those good moments stack up. They become the memories that make senior year feel like something worth celebrating instead of something you’re simply surviving. And that, in the end, is a big part of what life is about. We all collect hard lessons. We need them. But we also need as many positive memories as we can honestly gather. They are the ones that keep us company later.
I see you kids every day in the halls. Some of you already look like you’re carrying more than you should at fifteen. Some of you are lit up and flying. Most of you are somewhere in between, still figuring it out. That’s normal. Just don’t sleepwalk through ninth grade. The tone you set now will still be playing when you’re walking across that stage in a cap and gown.
Make it a good one.
—Pop