Many students go through all four years of high school without considering that it’s a unique period of your life that you only live once. After you graduate, you’re done — there’s no going back. No matter how you feel about high school, you must preserve pieces of your high school life so that you don’t regret it later on in the future.
What moments to capture:
You don’t have to obsess over taking too many photos or saving everything. Instead, consider what you care about at the moment and stay true to who you are.
For example, you can take a picture on your first and last day of school each year and compare the two to see how much you’ve changed. If you do this for all 4 years, the change will be even more apparent.
School events and activities are also a great place to make memories. Events like Trojan Olympics can be a way to show off your class pride, while smaller lunch games like the pizza eating competition are a breath of fresh air from the typical stress of school. Give it a try, you may find yourself regretting not going to enough events in the future.
Taking group photos is also important because the truth is, you’re going to meet many more people in your life, and the people you’re around now may not be the people you’re around in the future. But, it’ll be nice to look back and be able to say, “Hey, I remember him,” or “Didn’t they do so-and-so?”
What schoolwork to keep:
Some people throw away too much while others keep everything. You need to find the right balance between the two. Things like your daily math homework aren’t that exciting, but that one English project you spent a whole week on? It would be a waste if you didn’t have a photo or other item to remember it by.
When you’re contemplating whether or not you want to keep an assignment, think about how much that assignment represents your personality. Essays, for example, are a great display of your personality — given you didn’t use AI, of course. Since most essays are online nowadays, there’s no reason not to save them.
Other creative projects, like posters or models, are also important to keep. You don’t have to keep the physical items either — you can take a few photos or videos and then discard them if you don’t have space.
Report cards, certificates, and other awards are things you may want to look back on in the future as well. But those old tests and classwork you’ve done? I’d suggest throwing most, if not all, of that generic work away.
How to preserve and create memories:
Taking photos and deciding what schoolwork to keep is only scratching the surface of what you can do to preserve memories. If you want something physical to hold that can serve as a short blast to the past, making a scrapbook may be the right thing for you.
A scrapbook is like a photo album, except instead of just photos you can put any sort of memorabilia in it. Newspaper clippings, photos, stamps, and other travel souvenirs are all things you might find in a scrapbook.
If you don’t want to make your own scrapbook, buying the school yearbook is a great way to obtain something similar. Many people skip out on buying the yearbook, but don’t realize that you’re purchasing it for the future, not the present.
If you’re less interested in preserving memories and more focused on creating them, a bucket list is an amazing way to plan out the things you want to accomplish.
A bucket list is a collection of goals you want to accomplish. These goals can be about anything, whether it be traveling to another country, going on a road trip with your friends, or learning a new hobby.
Remember, though, creating and saving these remnants of your high school experience isn’t only to save yourself from regret in the future, but to lead you to pursue a more fulfilling life.
