Hazing: Being in the Haze

I am a swimmer at my school which means that when people look at me and see what my team and I do, they will judge not only our swim team but our school too. For some reason, the swim team is notorious for getting in trouble with hazing. The year before my freshman year many of the freshman at my school were taken out of the Varsity conference meet and were not allowed to swim due to the fact that they were apart of hazing. A teacher had overheard some of the swimmers talking about their senior night and because of this, many of them were not allowed to swim at Conference. Last year when I was a junior, there was a hazing incident and some swimmers had to clean up the mess that they made. It is truly disappointing that hazing happens at all. Yet it is even worse that when just a few or just one swimmer does something wrong like hazing, the whole team gets judged based off of what that one person did. This happened to me in school once with a teacher. I was dressed up getting ready for one of my first meets in my freshman year and she asked me what I was dressed up for. As soon as I said swimming she did not want to know anything about it and looked at me differently and treated me slightly different ever since I had said I was a swimmer. She had done this because she knew about all of the hazing incidents that had happened and did not support our team even though there was no way I was even apart of anything except the team because I had just joined. I couldn't have even been involved in the hazing or any incident that may have happened in the past. Treating people differently even when they have just joined a team and are just trying to find a fit in is wrong. That is how hazing begins in the first place, people feel uncomftorable so they bring others down to make themselves feel higher or better. In order to stop the cycle of people judging our team, teachers, students, and familys have to forgive what people have done in the past and accept the people who are on the team now. People should not be judged for what others have done and although this doesn't happen, the world could be a nicer place if we tried.

College Search

The search for the right college comes as a challenge to many teens. Picking a school where they will live and study for the next four years. Personally, the most daunting task for me was having to pick a school that had enough programs in which I may be able to switch into knowing that nearly 80% of freshman change their major within the first year plus on average college students will change majors three times in the course of their college career. I am one of the first people in my grade to have been accepted admission and confirming that admission into college. Another problem that many adults do not see about picking a college is how peers look at that school. Although I was able to brush aside my friends comments on this school it was a tough school to just look at at first because of what my friends said about it. I am going to Iowa State next year and many of my friends said it was a shoe in school and was at par with CLC. I eventually did my research on it and found out that it fit everything I wanted including scholarships. When I told my friends that I was accepted and had accepted their offer to their school they looked at me dumb struck because of the facts that they "thought" they knew about Iowa State. After their disapproval speeches I told them that they had one of the top electrical engineering schools in the country and that stopped them cold. It is a hard step to look at colleges on your own and drawing your own conclusions before you take into consideration all of the things your friends or family may say before hand. On my own college search I found that many colleges were a good match for myself and I found that this is okay. There is more than one college that is right for someone! That is something that every person looking at a college should know at the beginning of their college search. The reason that I have this blog post today is because I know how important a college education is. Some statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics studied the unemployment rate and compared people's education from there. They discovered that only the high school educated population has a unemployment rate of 10.8%, for a associates degree 8.2% and for a college degree 4.4%. Having a college degree not only increases the chance of finding a job but also making more money. A person who has a bachelor's degree on average makes about 20,000 more than a person with no bachelor's degree. By knowing  a few tips on finding the right college, a person can not increase their yearly pay check and obtain a higher chance at getting employed but also enjoy the education that they are getting.

Time Management

Deerfield High School is one of the best High Schools in Illinois and is even ranked nationally as 258th best in the nation even compared to private schools. This can be incredibly demanding on students to be able to reach these standards. Much of this is due to the hard work that the students do to achieve such high test scores. What many people do not stop to think about is how important it is for students to have some down time through all of this hard work these students put not only into their studies but their extracurriculars. Many students are apart of the extracurriculars at DHS, nearly 85% of students are in someway involved with DHS activities. Many students have a difficult time dealing with the stresses but a harder time juggling all of their extracurriculars and school. I for example, in the past week was involved with STUNTS and Boys Swimming and Diving. I was up by 5 am to go to practice, had school, swam until 5:30pm and then went to STUNTS til about 9 pm when I finally got home and had to do my homework. I did this for the whole week and it is a huge struggle to be able to balance school, swimming, STUNTS and getting enough sleep to be ready for the next day. Our schools should run some type of program to teach other students how to prioritize their school work and their extracurriculars without just punishing them for not being able to keep up their grades. In an essence, a time management class. I feel that this would fit in perfectly with  freshman advisory because many students do not do too much in this class and having this experience could greatly help them learn lessons that they will use throught their life without dealing with the consequences of not doing their work without being told how to manage their time to start with.

Curfew

The law in Deerfield says that a minor, someone under the age of 18 must be off the streets or sidewalks and public places by 11pm from Sunday to Thursday and by 12pm on Friday through Saturday. On Saturday I decided to go out with some band friends at someones house who was just across the street from me. It was a very relaxed gathering where we listened to music, had some m&ms and discussed many of the impressive Stunts acts. I got a call from my parents asking when I would be home and I said around two in the morning. I then got a call from them again saying I had to come home right around 12pm because that was curfew for Deerfield. I tried telling them that it was okay if I was late because I was across the street yet they insisted that I came home anyways. Sometimes, rules should be bent when no harm can come from bending them. I was at a very safe enviornoment with people that I knew where nothing could have gone wrong. Even if anything had went wrong I had a very easy escape route, going directly to my house which was across the street. Just because the sun goes away and it becomes later at night shouldn't mean that a person should be home or off the streets. Deerfield is a very safe place with no gang activity and a very open community. Why should there still be a curfew just because it is a certain time of day? Do bad things only happen at night? Curfew is most likely in place to stop people from drunk driving or roaming around the streets making a racket. Yet the people that are drunk are over 21 which means that curfew does not affect them. Why does the law want to stop teenagers from hanging out with their friends at a certain time of day? Possibly because law makers believe that teenagers can find other times to hang out with their friends yet most of the time teenagers are busy with other activities during the day and cannot find time during the day to just hang with their friends. For example, school begins and goes to 3:30 and I have swimming til 5:30. I would have hardly any time to hang with my friends on a friday night because I would only be able to hang out from 6-11. Curfew should be changed to allow teens to be able to socialize outside of their school or other activities.