Written by Kelsey Price – Country To Canberra Teen Blogger
Graduation day… the day that every high-school student cannot wait for. The day we get the freedom we wanted. But how prepared do we need to be? Being in Year 12, the realisation hits… the realisation being that our adult life starts, with job searching to do, and the growing responsibility on our shoulders.
No more of worrying about grades, or how many weeks you have left of school; before the holidays start, or even not worrying about going to assemblies, or uniforms. But with graduating, comes some sadness, of how lonely we are going to be when all of our class mates are moving away to pursue their careers or going to university. Although we have made many cherished memories, we will also never forget the bludging that we did instead of doing allocated class work. Report cards are what haunted us throughout these years and still influences us after graduating. The stress that we took on, to make sure that our report cards were of a high standard, so we can get jobs that we wanted.
The frequently used term ‘The Real World’ gets used in any common Year 12+ conversations. Are we not in the real world already? Or do people just add the word ‘real’ to say that the world gets more challenging; as in paying our own bills, moving out of home and being independent. We watch TV, we are on social media, we know what is happening with the world, is this what they mean by ‘the real world’… knowing about what is happening, being able to vote and pay bills. We may not have experienced these new adventures yet but we certainly know how to deal with them.
Another question we get frequently asked is ‘what are you going to do when you are finished school?’. For me, I have no idea, it is a confusing time – to try and figure out what I am going to do. I have so many things I’m interested in, am I meant to generate a career based on my interests or how much the job pays? I feel like I am never going to get a job that I would truly enjoy, because the income influences everything. Why should we have to know what we want to do, after all, we haven’t experienced the so called ‘real world’ yet. What if we don’t want to settle in one place, what if we want different jobs that take us all over the world. In the end, if you chose a job you love, you will never have to work a day in your life.
So school is basically a life preparer, in which we learn deadlines, goal setting, and achieve a social life, to graduate, and do it all over again. Should we be scared to graduate… or excited? Are we ever going to be ready for ‘the real world.’ After all, no one knows what their future holds. So how can school prepare us for what is going to happen?