By: Rory Zeman

Media-Production Editor

As the class of 2025 enters the final stage of our high school journey, it is important to stay on top of your health amidst all the chaos that the year entails. It is especially important that everyone look out for symptoms of early-onset senioritis. Although this disease has a low mortality rate and is neither viral nor infectious, senioritis is very contagious. 

Those most at risk tend to be people who have the following underlying health conditions: people who have over ten colleges listed in their common app, those who took the SAT three times or more as a Junior, and those who have graphed a Cosine wave one or more times in their entire high school career. However, there are ways both to diagnose yourself while the illness is still in the early stages of development and combat the horrific disease.

If you think you have contracted the illness just a mere few weeks into your senior year, then there are a few ways to confirm a diagnosis. To start, if you have been experiencing bed rot throughout the summer and into the school year, then senioritis may have infiltrated your bloodstream. However, some of the signs aren’t as obvious. For example, a subtle indicator of senioritis is somehow managing to wake up five hours later on Saturday than you would during a school day. Sleep schedules only exist for underclassmen, making this a sure sign of preliminary senioritis. In addition, if you have found yourself not wanting to do any school work and waiting until 10 pm every day to start your homework, then I am sorry to say that your senioritis has probably come into full effect. Fear not, though, for there are solutions.

The best way to combat first-semester senioritis is to reinstate the emotions that you have lost through all of your work and brain rot. The first thing you will want to do is block every single user on your social media who talks about college apps. Enough with the videos like “This college rejected the valedictorian that worked for NASA” or “You need to start a passion project right now.” Let yourself live without the constant harassment of these TikToks that only discourage you from doing any work by making it seem futile in comparison to the college app demons. In addition, you need to attempt to reinvigorate your pre-senioritis motivations. One easy way to do this is to attempt to back out of the corner spot in the senior lot with a GMC Yukon XL immediately after school on a Monday afternoon when it’s 97 degrees and your car’s AC doesn’t work. This way, you will finally feel an emotion that isn’t anxiety or stress, just utter and uncontrollable rage. 

Many academically inclined seniors are already suffering from the senioritis pandemic, so it is crucial to bring back some sense of your prime academic self, despite the innate desire you may have to feel overly stressed about your final year. So when you can feel the senioritis spreading through your brain as you stare mindlessly at your full Canvas to-do list at an unreasonably late hour, or when you wake up to the sound of your David Goggins alarm audio after a solid five hours of sleep, just remember that God created Red Bull for a reason, which is the only treatment scientifically proven to assist you in your fight against senioritis.