<p>I remember an MTV show with a similar title (probably still running) in which celebrities would recall their lives when they were 17. It seemed that academics were the furthest thing from their mind, and it was fun watching them talk about which car they drove, their happiest/worst/funniest high school memories, the important people in their lives, their hopes and dreams for the future.</p>
<p>I’m still in HS right now so I can’t reflect back on my HS years (yet) so I was wondering what you parents have to say about HS and that time. Were you stressing over college applications or trying to throw the wildest parties? What did you hope you would do as an adult? Did you have a job? What were your friends like? </p>
<p>They wouldn’t have invited me to that MTV show, even if I was a celebrity.</p>
<p>I was academic. In fact, I was valedictorian, although I had hoped not to be because I would have preferred not to give that speech.</p>
<p>I didn’t worry overly much about the college application process. I cranked out the applications, waited for the results in April, made a decision about which college to go to in 5 minutes, and never second-guessed it. </p>
<p>I was very unhappy at 17. My best friend had graduated a year early and gone off to college, and life wasn’t the same without her. I had a job I didn’t want and didn’t like, but my parents insisted that I had to work (which meant dropping out of my ECs and having too little time for homework). I disliked my high school, which was kind of a rough place, and couldn’t wait to get out of there. And I had no idea what would happen in the future. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and I had no idea what careers I could aspire to as a college graduate. Except for my teachers and various doctors and dentists, I had never met a college graduate, and I knew I did not want to be a teacher or a health care professional. So my future was a big question mark.</p>
<p>I also started dating the guy I eventually married when I was 17, but of course I didn’t know then that he would end up being my husband.</p>
<p>I attended a very academically oriented school. It wasn’t cool to get bad grades. I don’t know that I stressed out about the application process but I did worry that I wouldn’t be accepted anywhere, which I think is common. I got accepted everywhere I applied so it was unfounded but you never know. I had a job in the summers but was in sports during the school year so no time to work then. My friends were all pretty down to earth kids, not partiers, not the crowd that was overly focused on how their hair looked, mostly nice jocks really. Of course, like every other 17 year old, we felt we knew everything :D.</p>
<p>When I was 17 I was attending an alternative high school, where students had contracts instead of traditional classes. I was struggling as I needed more structure and my after school job left me fairly exhausted. ( i didnt have a car and school was three miles away, my job was a mile away from that- i walked but sometimes I got ride home from work with a coworker)
My father died suddenly that year, and I moved in with my 21 yr old boyfriend who lived in a rural community after my summer job ended. </p>
<p>College wasn’t in the picture as a high school dropout, although BF encouraged me to take my GED exam, which I did, and then started thinking about attending a community college, for which I could get social security checks for dependents for attending. But I didn’t know about financial aid or any other means for paying for school, or what attending might mean.</p>
<p>I had a great year as a 17-year-old. I was on track to be valedictorian, won a couple of major piano competitions, and decided to study engineering. I also came out of my shell and had a real social life for the first time - boyfriend and everything. I was on top of the world!</p>
<p>When I was seventeen…My Dad had passed away and both older siblings were out of the house so it was just my Mom and me living on social security checks and her job as a secretary at our church. I was a good student at the top of my class, a cheerleader,had an afterschool job, a piece of junk Ford Pinto and a good group of friends. I guess I’d say I was part of the “popular crowd” at my h.s. I was not a “wild child” but did some things I would not have been proud to tell my mother.</p>
<p>But all that paled in comparison to my devotion to my boyfriend who was two years older and attended college an hour from our hometown. I was in love and obsessed with him. He came home to see me every weekend. He was very possessive of me but I naively saw that as love. I counted the days until graduation so I could attend the same state u. he was attending. Naturally, I only applied to one college…his. I didn’t give a thought to any other schools. </p>
<p>I turned eighteen just before leaving for college. I thought my dream had come true.
He broke up with me at the end of my first semester…best thing that ever happened to me.</p>
<p>When I was seventeen
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for small town girls
And soft summer nights
We’d hide from the lights
On the village green
When I was seventeen</p>
<p>never stressed, had a good time with friends…we all are now happy and doing well in life. I feel sad for today’s teenagers who are always stressed…my kids are certainly not stressed either, that’s not what life is all about.</p>
<p>When I was seventeen, with brilliant blonde hair and skinny arms and legs,
I traveled to Tuscon and Phoenix and was offered a flower for lunch by a hippie in Sedona and jumped off a high rock into a pool of clear water.</p>
<p>I flew on a plane with my portable cassette thingy. I was in love with every boy ever and was a secret melancholic cheerleader who wrote poetry and left it on top of my math teachers desk to proclaim my dissent over the arbitrary Algebraic equations that eluded me. </p>
<p>I impressed the math teacher but he still flunked me. I was in all the plays and dated a black boy that angered my grandpa. Then I graduated, got pregnant, spent a semester at Kent State throwing up in cafeterias, buses, classrooms, parking lots until it was so severe I had to come home. </p>
<p>I wanted to be an actress or a writer.
That was me around 17 to 18. You asked.</p>
<p>I graduated early from HS and started college two days after my 17th birthday. I was academically inclined and did not really cut loose until I was 22. And by then I was ready to have fun…with a vengeance.</p>
<p>At 17, life was school related. Homecoming committee meetings, synchronized swimming practices and meets, school newspaper articles due. </p>
<p>Homework was sitting in my room with my typewriter poised on my bed typing what seemed like endless papers, stories (I did a lot of creative writing), etc.</p>
<p>I was applying to college but that was not stressful because there was not really an emphasis on a “looking” process - I went where my to be sister-in-law went cause it had my major and it seemed “fine”. </p>
<p>My biggest worry was what I thought was my overprotective parents (really, what were they worried about?! A night out was driving around town with the girls and stopping at Friendly’s for ice cream!!! )</p>
<p>At 17, I was in France living with a French family and studying French. I’d already gotten into Harvard, but was allowed to defer matriculation for a year. It really exercised a different portion of my brain, and made all future language learning much easier - I’d been a dunce in French in high school. My French family were very interested in architecture and history (the father ran the local history museum) and I got interested in that while there. It also got me off the academic fast track and I ended up with a much more hands-on major in college which combined both architectural history and art and design courses. I spent the summer working in Tanzania at the USIS library putting up window displays and exhibits about whoever was coming through on cultural visits. (Nikki Giovanni that summer.) It was a very good year and really set the course for my future life.</p>
<p>I skipped a grade so my 17th birthday was in May of my senior year. I was a good student , top 10 % by the skin of my teeth but since I knew that I was starting my college career at the local cc, I didn’t knock myself out studying. I had an atypical cc experience because so many kids where I lived went there (including several top students) there was no stigma. I met a lot of people and went out a lot to parties, bars and dated a lot. There was a loosy knit group of a few hundred people who always seemed to be the people who were in the social scene and my friends and I were part of that. I had a lot of fun.</p>
<p>I was attending an independent day school and riding horses. I thought I wanted to be a vet, and was applying to flagship state universities to major in animal science. I was preparing for my USPC A rating and actually passed my A while I was 17 and a college freshman. I was the youngest person in my club to become an A. </p>
<p>(For people who know Pony Club – this is before HAs and C3s etc etc, there were a lot fewer hoops to jump through before your A test)</p>
<p>When I was 17, I had just come back from a summer program in France and felt way too big for my small-town life. I was trying to balance high school romance, college applications, jobs, ECs and fitting as much partying in to my life as humanly possible. </p>
<p>I had big dreams, but was still small-town enough to think that my true love was a local boy and turned down my dream school to go to state school when he didn’t have the grades to get in. This is still one of my biggest regrets, though the future was so bright at 17. </p>
<p>Like mspearl, I was in all the plays and I thought I might be an actress, but I was really shooting for the next Oprah.</p>
<p>At 17, it was the end of junior year into senior. My dad has his first hospitalization for what would be his terminal illness. I was working 20+ hours/week plus holding down a honors math/science schedule. I ended up being NMSF but no one told me what that meant. My fellow honors students thought I was unmotivated and didn’t study enough; the rest of the school thought I was really smart I had the worst case of senioritis ever which started mid-junior year. I was absent 39 days my senior year (1 less than the administrative maximum.) </p>
<p>Had 2 boyfriends that year. Don’t remember much about classes, but a lot about work. Loved punk/new wave & rock & roll. Went to my first concert (the Police with Black Ururu opening up.) Spent a lot of time taking the bus to Manhattan and just walking around the Village with my friends.</p>
<p>I was 17 at a time students were not being prepared for college in preschool. While most of my classmates DID go on to college, there wasn’t the rat race there appears to be nowadays. My HS had a class of 500 ranging from low-income to very wealthy-but we all knew that if all else failed anyone could go to either the state U or the “Voc tech” there in the city. I had friends who did both, and friends who went to HYP, plus one who was married before the end of senior year.</p>
<p>So-the summer I was 17 I was at an academic summer school with a few hundred other acheivers at a bording school in my state, but not stressing that it was to make my college apps look better. It just seemed like more fun than sitting around or riding bikes all summer. I was spending time in the school libraray looking up college info because this was in the days before internet and because my HS counselor was less than useless. On weekends I’d go home and hang out with my friends-not a few parties or cruising on our main street. </p>
<p>Once the summer program ended I worked as many hours as possible for my dad at his store. Once school started I worked less, studied more, hung around on weekends. I didn’t look at a college other than on paper until I’d been accepted to one. My fondest memories of that year are of editing the school magazine, having my first real romance, and of some great adventures with friends. It’s a time I remember fondly. And I’ve come full-circle, having reconnected with those friends on Facebook. I was lucky enough to visit with one in person just 6 months before she died suddenly last winter.</p>
<p>I turned 17 right after senior year started. I was dating a man 12 years older than I was and my parents were OK with that. He is still a family friend, in fact. I was tired of high school, but was principal clarinetist in our great concert and marching band. I broke a lot of rules- leaving campus for lunch, violating the dress code, etc. I loved my friends. Alcohol was plentiful, I still got good grades and was figuring out where to go to college.</p>
I had the worst case of senioritis ever which started mid-junior year. I was absent 39 days my senior year (1 less than the administrative maximum.) </p>