Senior Connectedness
It's currently May of my senior year. This means a few things:
- I'm about to graduate.
- Seniors have been spending a lot time with their friends and people they haven't reached out to.
- Prom is in a week.
Maybe the fact that prom is soon doesn't matter, but I still want to use this space to flex my promposal:
But what I want to focus more on is the second point. Throughout my time at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA), I've gone through a lot of social tribulations and stipulations with my quad. From dealing with snarky or weird upperclassmen, club politics, and starting school online to achieving our biggest endeavors, being accepted into top colleges, and becoming closer to each other than any other friends we've had, I only word I can use to describe myself is "lucky".
In junior year, I sometimes felt that staying contained to my quad was harmful to my social experience. As such, I tried to branch out more. I found new friendships through clubs, I got into a relationship, I started talking to people from other schools, and was overall just more well-connected than at the beginning of the year. A lot of these connections were useful for a variety of reasons: college advice, emotional support, growth in emotional maturity, etc.
And though I appreciate each and every person that I've come in contact with, it made me realize that the people closest to me were still my quadmates. They were the people I'd come to at the end of a strenuous day, the people I would talk to if I needed advice (for literally anything), and the people I felt most like myself around.
I made these realizations near the end of junior year and it definitely helped that my seniors at the time were starting to form their end of the year friend groups. With little to no work to do and amazing weather outside, people were starting to hang out outside more and more with the friends they held closest to them instead of wasting their last few weeks with people that didn't matter as much to them.
Now, I'm in my seniors' position. As graduation inches ever so close, it's hard to know where I should be spending my time. But to be honest, it's entirely trivial. It's fun to play spikeball for hours with an unexpected crowd; to listen to Frank Ocean with my quadmates until midnight; to watch Shiqi break down over how she hears music as solfege; to mald over stupid classes; or to soak in the aroma of sweet watermelon combined with fresh mint.
Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point rolls over a famous concept that any given human is at most six mutual connections "away" from any other human. He also has the following quote:
Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
Now that I'm at the end of my three years at IMSA, I can confidently say that I have found those special few. And though I'm beyond excited for what college has to hold, I'll go in reluctantly, wondering if I'll ever find friends like the ones I've made here.