What High School Is Really Like

For its 2023 art contest, the Learning Network, an educational resource of The New York Times, explored this question: “What is high school like in 2023?” The contest generated thousands of submissions, with participants sharing their insights through multimedia art and essays. Some of the entries by the student winners, announced earlier this year, are featured here, along with their statements.

For entries that featured videos or GIFs, the print magazine shows screenshots, with the multimedia available on our website. Which of these students’ stories resonate with your own experience, and which ones offer a new perspective?

There are bittersweet moments that make you so grateful for your youth. Moments like when you have to make the choice of which seat you’ll take on the bus on a beautifully lit afternoon, or which hallway you’ll take to your chemistry class. Moments that show you the connections you’ll deem worth it and continue to work on, and moments that contribute to the person you choose to become.

Ever since I started noticing the simple things, I learned to find something to appreciate about high school even during the hardest of times. These are the moments that you will reminisce about later on in life when someone asks you, “What was high school like?” Moments where you’re experimenting with who you are and where you stand in the world. Moments of finding your interests, your voice, your people.

High school in 2023 is stressful. Very often I suffocate in a spiral of thoughts. Every day there is a long to-do list waiting for me, every day there is an update on the climate crisis or another school shooting that reminds me of the fact that my generation now has to remedy the circumstances we find ourselves in. A responsibility that I will be graduating into within two years.

But I titled the film “To The Lighthouse” for a reason. When the light shines on the papers sprawled on my desk near the end of the video, I wanted to express that the fear toward taking action is what holds one back from finding the light. Combating that fear and putting my time into actually trying assures me that I can at least see the lighthouse where it’s calling in the lost sailors back to land.

As I was scrolling through my camera roll, looking for a picture that truly captured the experience of high school in 2023, I realized that in every situation, no matter how whimsical or mundane, the cathartic glow of a phone was always a constant. I decided to piece the presence of phones together in a collage.

Through these illuminated screens, news whips around our school faster than an F1 jet. Talk of half days and active-shooter scares, warnings of pop quizzes, pictures of assignments, videos of fights and videos of promposals. When our school principal’s contract was up for reconsideration, phones in our school would not stop buzzing. The student presence at the board meeting that night was unparalleled. Our phones rallied us together and our principal’s contract was renewed.

This is how we communicate. This is how we connect. This is how we catalog our achievements as well as our failures, and show our peers that we are not alone.

I feel like a data point on the algorithm. Especially when I’m in between classes, mindlessly scrolling through Instagram to see what it believes would get my attention.

“BEST methods to study for a test”—next.

“The KEY to getting into your dream college”—scroll.

“Words you need to STOP repeating in your essays”—skip.

Wait, actually? Go back. I’ll save it for the future.

In between the “3 ingredients no bake” recipes and “fall clothing essentials” are reminders that in two years, I will be leaving the belly of the whale that is high school and stepping into the fabled territory that is college. I feel completely directionless. Despite all these resources telling me what I need to do and how I have to do it, I still find myself clueless.

What was once an interesting gimmick has now become an essential tool. What once would’ve been hours of study has now been condensed to a few minutes of typing in prompts.

Although this new method of “studying” has saved me countless hours and provided me with shortcuts to problems, I somehow feel a sense of melancholy. Now the work I produce seems somewhat soulless. It doesn’t grant the same satisfaction as finally finding that word on thesaurus.com that fits my rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter, or when that error finally disappears in the code I’ve been hacking at for hours. Now all of that can be done in a second.

I love A.I. But I believe that high school students should sometimes put down the tools, grab a pen and “generate” some work of our own.

I believe there is something truly magical when you create from scratch, carefully crafting every detail. We cannot be the generation to lose
this magic.

Our school’s bathrooms were renovated this year. Slick gray tiles, cool gray walls, graffiti covered up by coats of paint. Instinctively, I look to the bottom right corner of the handicapped stall as I enter.

Before the gray paint there was streaky, yellow grime littered with girl talk. Girl talk about how we just wanna peel our baby tees off and chuck ’em in the trash, about how even if you feel like the loneliest person on Earth there’s some babe with big fake eyelashes in room 302 that’ll lend you the shoes off her feet if you just say the word.

The center of the girl talk was this whisper that said something like “Everyone leaves” or “I feel so ugly about everything.” It became a sort of seed, the center of a flower that scattered out in every direction. “You’re gorgeous, I just know it, girl.” “We’re in this together.” “I love you! I love you all.”

As I’m squinting, tryna see the shadow of our girl talk beneath the gray, somebody heads into the second stall. I hardly register her presence ’til I hear a clink, a plop, and a profanity, and suddenly I’m facing her direction.

“You okay?”

She opens the door and tears have already started down her cheeks. Big, loopy curls fall around her head, and I wonder if she too spent her childhood at the business end of a brush, dad gripping her scalp and demanding she stop squirming.

“I dropped my left AirPod,” she starts, bringing her hands to her face to cover the oncoming deluge of snot, “in the toilet.”

I frown. I wonder if those AirPods would take her 10 hours of work to pay off again, feet throbbing as she stands at the drive-through dressing burgers. The same way it’d take me 10 hours to pay off mine.

I didn’t know nothing about this girl two minutes ago except that she was wearing some pink Converse, but suddenly she’s my sister and I’m rolling up my sweater sleeves. I march toward the toilet like it’s some kid on the playground that needs reprimanding, my mind made up.

I make the plunge.

It’s cold and wet and smells like the back seat of a school bus, but I grimace and hold my breath. I brush the AirPod with my finger tips—success! I palm it and bring it up for air.

I turn away from the toilet, and before I even open my mouth, she pulls me into a hug so tight the breath is knocked outta me.

We’re both cheesing, smiles so big they could make a large pizza, feed half the population of Palm Beach. Girl talk.

Being a student athlete requires finding the almost impossible balance between school, sports, and sleep. Sometimes, that means doing your homework on the bleachers of a volleyball court because we don’t get home until close to 10 p.m.

But I can always turn to my teammates for support. I can talk to them about anything that I have on my mind without feeling judged. The friendships that you make through sports will last forever.