There are many dangers associated with college life, but the one that sticks out as being directly caused by college life is: senioritis. You won’t find this in a medical dictionary, but Wikipedia lists senioritis as: “a term used colloquially to describe the decreased motivation towards studies displayed by students who are nearing the end of their high school or college careers.” Senioritis’ symptoms include slowness, procrastination, apathy (in regards to school work), and of course the ever-increasing desire to skip class.
Other problems can also pop up that don’t even seem to be problems. Seniors often spend lots of time focusing their energy on one of the following seemingly important endeavors instead of their schoolwork: finding a job for after graduation, possibly partying too much, playing too much World of Warcraft, preparing for the GRE for graduate school, partying, spending too much time on MySpace, or simply partying too much.
By now, if you are like me, you are wondering if there is a cure for senioritis, or at least an injection that will prevent its spread throughout the student body. But there is no known cure for senioritis.
However, there are steps that can be taken to combat its effects. For instance, some professors have decided that your senior year should be spent constantly working on papers, projects and lengthy assignments. This does work in about half of the cases, but in the other half it makes the symptoms drastically worse for the suffer of senioritis. While this is great for the people that it bullies into success, for the other half of us, it means failing in your senior year.
Another idea that could help combat senioritis is to set yourself a very detailed and itemized schedule for your senior year, or last semester. This way you can simply fall back on the schedule instead of letting how much work you have to do get you down. Just stay focused on the task at hand. The other option is to “phone-it-in” your last semester. Simply put this means to do the minimum amount of effort and hope that your professors either give you a good grade out of pity, or that they don’t fail you because you are about to graduate.
The only obvious solution to this is to seek medical help. While senioritis isn’t recognized as a “real” disease by the American Psychological Association, it is considered, unofficially, to be close to depression and anxiety, with the help of seniors across the country we can get this baby on the list. All it will take is a little effort from us all.
Instead of working on your schoolwork, make an appointment at the counselor’s office and tell them about all the suffering you are going through because of senioritis.