As my time in these halls comes to a close I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on my experiences here and share them with you all.

During my brainstorm process for this column, the one question that I seemed to come back to was, “What did I learn in high school?”

And I realize now that i’ve learned a great deal.

I have learned how to follow a rubric to the T when crafting a project about the reactants and products of cellular respiration. I have mastered the art of cultivating the perfectly typed and formatted MLA paper over the significance of the common yam. I have developed the imperative skill of pushing sleep to the wayside and finishing my chemistry notes. I have learned all the tricks of using a TI-84 calculator, and I am now an expert in graphing a parabola, a trig function and even a polynomial equation.

Through all the years, and all the tests, lectures, assemblies, notes, group-projects, and homework assignments, the quadratic formula is the least of what I’ve learned.

I entered high school as a depressed, anxious kid with friends I feared opening up to.

Honors biology taught me to persevere when the going gets tough, something I use now when I feel the good things in life are too far away.

Anatomy and Physiology taught me to be confident in my answers, and that it’s OK to be the person who always raises their hand in class, a skill I now use when I feel the need to second-guess myself.

AP Psychology taught me there are uncontrollable reasons for why some people do what they do, a mindset I always try and remember when interacting with people.

Newspaper taught me to use my voice and write about things I want people to hear, something I incorporate in my finsta account where I share the valleys as well as the peaks of my mental illness.

And now I can proudly say that I’m a confident, outgoing, emotionally wise young adult.

And that I made it.

With graduation on the horizon, I’m constantly being asked, “Aren’t you going to miss this place?”

The answer is yes, I’ll miss the familiarity of how high school works and the teachers who helped shape who I am, but I’m ready to go.

I’ve learned all that I could about rhetoric meanings, linear regression, momentum, the New Deal, stoichiometry and mitosis, so now it’s time to learn all that I can at K-State and grow into the person I envision myself to be.