“It is 2023, the year you will graduate from Deerfield!”
If you received this message, sent by Manager of Student Information Systems Ms. Donnally Drake on January 11, this sentence was probably not a surprise. After all, your internal countdown to high school graduation likely started the day you stepped onto Deerfield’s campus. Nonetheless, we seniors are faced with concerns about how we will finish “our year” rather than how we will enjoy it. Without having sufficient time to embrace the significance of “our year,” we are pressed to decide on our senior quotes, get our senior portraits taken, and contemplate what kind of legacy we will leave behind when we depart on May 28.
Accompanying this shocking realization is the increasing awareness of our class’s receding presence and the younger classes’ growing one. The juniors, often the loudest voices in the Dining Hall, also own most of the real estate in a way that often overshadows the so-called “Senior Bubble.” Senior club and alliance leaders (including the Scroll XCVII board) will soon start making way for new, excited younger students fueled by ambitious visions. Juniors gossip among themselves about their potential Student Body President and proctors. Then, in more hushed whispers, they see members of our class receive their college acceptance letters and speculate about what their application processes will be like, just as our class did last year.
As graduates have done in the past, we will leave our mark on this campus and its remaining people as we step into the next stages of our lives. Soon, the next three classes will enter their graduation year with a sort of wistful sigh stuck in their chests that begs simultaneously for captivity and release, thinking that the seniors were right about one thing: time really does move quickly at Deerfield. Four years can feel like an eternity, but also a mere second in our lives once it’s time to move on.
For now, however, we are still “as green as can be,” and “we’re the class of ’23.”