<p>I turned 17 during my senior year in high school. I was miserable and unhappy. I think I cried every day–certainly every school day. I only applied to 4 colleges, but I really sweated admissions. Most of my classmates were planning on going to state U and could not understand why I did not want to do the same. Things got really ugly when I turned down a merit scholarship to a local college to go “back East.” The college I turned down was the alma mater of many teachers in my school and they could not understand how anyone wouldn’t want to go there. </p>
<p>That summer my dad retired and we moved. I started college in the fall; I was still 17. I went from being utterly miserable to very, very happy. I made more friends the first month of college than I had in the last 3 years of high school.</p>
<p>And then there was Janis Ian’s take on Seventeen:</p>
<p>I leaned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear-skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired</p>
<p>The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth…</p>
<p>When I was 17 I was trying to figure life out and not doing a very good job. I am an adoptee, and along with all the usual adolescent angst, I had a lot of identity issues. But, since everything about being adopted is so wonderful and beautiful, I wasn’t allowed to have issues with it. So they came out in other ways … problems with peers, problems in school. And nobody even tried to understand. I finally threatened suicide in the spring of my junior year, so my parents got me some help - a psychiatrist friend of theirs who made borderline sexually inappropriate remarks to me and no doubt repeated every word I said to my parents. Yeah - some help. What finally turned it around was going away to a 5-week summer course for kids considering studying journalism. I got a much-needed break from everything, made good friends and gained some perspective. I calmed down a lot and actually had a decent senior year.</p>
<p>On my 17th birthday I was halfway through my senior year, bored, with very few friends, feeling overprotected and yearning for a new start at college. I applied to 3 colleges, which was normal at the time, and it never occured to me to worry about admissions. I got into all 3, chose Penn State, and started counting down the days until I could move out of my house. Like someone else said, I made more friends my first term at college than … well, in my whole life. By my 18th birthday, State College, PA was my home. The place I went to on term breaks was just where I went to visit my family. </p>
<p>I absolutely loved college, in every way. Getting away and dealing with life on my own was the best thing that could have happened to me.</p>
<p>At 17 I bought a used Volkswagon, of which my parents matched my savings for me to buy. I used to drive it from SoCal to the Colorado river at night when it was cooler on the engine. Layed on the docks tanning and hitchhiked rides on boats and thought I was soooo cool. HS academics weren’t my thing, but I was an athlete when Title IV came around and also was the wierd kid in school that had perfect pitch. Got to go (forced) to many events, usually being introduced as the unique (freaky) person that had a pitchfork in my brain. Most entailed meeting people I could care less about, although I was in awe of meeting Zubin Mehta at the Hollywood Bowl.</p>
<p>It was a much simpler time, though I sometimes wonder how I wonder how I didn’t end up dead in a ditch due to some questionable choices.</p>
<p>I turned 17 in the fall of my senior year. I had finally found my niche in high school straddling the “outdoorsy, nerdy” group and the “student government/political” group (oh wait, in Seattle aren’t those the same kids?). I fell in love for the first time, spent hours and hours writing letters (remember those?) to other kids I had met at summer leadership camps and to the “he’s just a friend” boy who was at the state U. We’ve been married 36 years, but that’s another thread…at 17 I was in love with another boy.
I remember filling in the big file-folder style applications for the four or five schools where I applied. One was TCU, which was across the country but surely would give me a merit scholarship despite the fact that I filled in the essay box with a pen and no rough draft! Two LACs in the NW and the state school. Not UW, because my dad thought I could live at home and commute. Ended up with a good enough merit scholarship at one of the LACs that it was within reach of the state school.
Turned 18 after classes started. My room-mate made me a cake with “18 and still a virgin” on it. I was startled to think that was unusual but made the excuse that she was from LA, where it was different.
Lots of fun, lots of angst, lots of worry and work and lots of memories.
Oh, I forgot the memory for Seattle folks this week.
Several of my girlfriends and I had enrolled in the Sea Explorers end of the Boy Scouts when they went co-Ed. (Boys plus sailboats? Heaven!). Somehow the SeaFair folks decided that SeaScouts would be great volunteers to patrol the Hydroplane pits at night. We roamed around with big flashlights at Stan Sayers pits. Our only confrontations were with drunk pit crew members… Jeez, I would never have let my kid do that, but it was great.</p>
<p>Well, when I was 17 I can’t say that academics was the furthest thing from my mind since I was in school 5 days a week for the better part of the year. It’s just not what comes to mind first when, years later, I reflect on what life was like when I was 17.</p>
<p>When I was still 17, I had just completed my first semester in college and it didn’t go very well. I partied way too much with my fraternity brothers, attended a few peace marches and SDS rallies, pulled a prank which made the front page of a major metropolitan newspaper, and was hitchhiking every weekend to see my girlfriend.</p>
<p>My Calculus professor had taught in Germany and he had no idea how to help 17 and 18-year olds grasp his subject. Most of us got D’s and F’s. That was my exit as a Math Major.</p>
<p>I finished high school and started college at 17 and it was a dramatic change. Only it was the complete opposite of TonyK’s and most undergrads. </p>
<p>I was wondering what I was doing wrong because I never expected college would be so much easier that I rapidly had to adjust from the HS persona of academic-slacker/class clown to fooling so many undergrad classmates and Profs into believing I was a serious intellectual scholar* and the man to turn to for academic help…and getting paid for it to boot. My undergrad record reflected that as it’s the near polar opposite of my HS transcript. </p>
<p>I was also surprised at the reduction of stress and the great increase in the amount of free time I had even with maxing out at 16 credits/semester, skipping intro/intermediate courses, working part-time jobs, and ECs. </p>
<p>Took a few road trips during the fall semester to visit friends at other campuses and enjoyed the adventure of being on my own…including striking up random conversation on political, philosophical, metaphysical topics with complete strangers on the T during my visit to the Boston area schools my friends were attending. </p>
<p>My friends and I also crashed several corporate/fancy parties held in some ritzy Boston area hotels…good way to get free food and enjoy the thrill of thumbing one’s nose against conventional establishment social norms. Only downside was an older friend of a HS classmate ended up being hit on by multiple drunken women in their 50’s. HS classmates and I enjoyed having him run interference for us as we partook in the food and desserts. He didn’t appreciate us taking our sweet time nor our encouragements for him to see how quickly he and one of them will invite us all to their wedding. </p>
<ul>
<li>This still earns a well-deserved snort from HS classmates who remembered my grades and behavior in high school.</li>
</ul>
<p>Being from a lower middle class family, the expectation was 100% that I would go to community college to start. There was little thought about it, as the two cc’s I considered had probably a 100% acceptance rate. I blew off high school, taking a half load in my senior year (band, jazz band, and home ec), while working full time. Never did homework (not required), never studied for a test (got by on luck and genetics), very busy with drum and bugle corps, work, and I did a lot of running. Parties, fun, work, no scholastics. Vaguely wanted to be an astronaut (got halfway there, I guess). Started college at 17, which was definitely more interesting than sleeping through classes in high school.</p>
<p>What was interesting was that my parents are highly educated and intellectual. They spent many hours drilling me on math and giving me science projects in grammar school. But when it came to middle school, they were so enveloped in their own problems and interests, they stopped paying attention, eventually becoming unaware of whether I even came home at night. It correlated with my scholastic performance dropping from being at the top of the class to mediocre. But I didn’t resent that, I ended up getting an engineering degree and becoming successful in spite of it. Or maybe because of it.</p>
<p>I was 17 not that long ago and remember it pretty well. It was such a great time in my life, especially the part where I was in high school. I liked my high school expereince a lot and look back on it fondly. Half of the year I was in high school the rest was over the summer and first year of college. It was a lot of fun. I did not drive, I walked everywhere, took the bus or subway or my parents would drive me. Senior year I had a lot of classes with my friends and it was pretty fun. I had a job in a restuarant which was pretty entertaining and well paying, for a teenager. In retrospect, i wish I would have gone out with the friends I had then more often. I was often too busy working or studing ( now I rarely remember any of the things I spent hours studying). I applied to a lot of scholarships and a few schools, studied a lot for my AP tests, and focused on doing well in school. I had an idea of what to major in but was pretty ambivalent about it. I knew I just wanted something that would be well paying and not too difficult to find a job in. The start of college for me was pretty stressful. I was always one to worry about grades/ the future, plan everything over analyze any situation. So any thing new was very stressful for me at the time. Even when I was doing well I would worry about not doing well or something that given my academic history was pretty irrational. Wish I wasted less time on those thoughts!</p>
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