As the class of 2022 nears the end of a historically difficult college admissions process and nearly two years in a COVID learning environment, a wave of fatigue and restlessness have washed over seniors.

These symptoms have been commonly labeled by high schools as “senioritis.” Senior Dean Daniel George says that the “obvious” manifestations of senioritis lie in “students finding it very hard to complete assignments and assessments” as well as “repeated cases of extreme tardiness.”

This spike in senioritis in the spring semester represents big pendulum swing from the large amount of motivation that many seniors possessed in the fall semester during college application season. Through the early application process alone, seniors had been accepted into 126 different institutions.

Senior Dan Ye, who was accepted early into the class of 2026 at Washington University in St. Louis, says that “after getting into college, I have definitely been less motivated.” For Ye, “college was definitely a big stressor and motivator.” Now that this stressor has been more or less lifted from Ye’s life, when asked to describe the extent to which senioritis has negatively affected him, he said that it “pretty much always” affected him down the home stretch.

Dean George has taken notice of this emotional toll that many seniors have had to process. He says that these days, he sees that “some of the nicest, most positive kids come in just looking down in the dumps, finding it hard to have a smile on their face. They say ‘I know I can see the end, I know what’s happening, but… I can’t see the end’”. 

Some also take COVID into consideration when analyzing this year’s abnormal case of senioritis. Junior Dean and AP Psychology teacher Diane Gioia cites the “general adaptation syndrome,” which essentially places limits on “how our body responds to stress. You can only fight it for so long…some people get sick, get tired.” To Gioia, two years of COVID regulations and an extremely busy senior year have stretched student’s brains beyond what is psychologically reasonable and generally healthy.

Additionally, she recognizes that students are “under a lot of low level stressors everyday,” and also that for seniors, “there is an expectation for [them] to hit a slide” in terms of academic attitudes, which may force students into a self-fulfilling prophecy

On both sides, it has been recognized that the anxiety and fatigue of the class of 2022 is inevitable. However, George stresses that there is control in the hands of students. He suggests that “compartmentalization will get you through,” and that it’s important for seniors to “plan lots of breaks where you get to enjoy things you did back in freshman, sophomore, and junior years that really made you happy.”