High School Graduation Guide: 10 Useful Tips and Advice
Graduating high school is a huge deal; it signifies a period of change and adjustment and is an emotional time in your life. As a soon to be graduate or recent graduate, the future may seem intimidating, so to help you beat the uncertainties, here is a high school graduation guide, with 10 useful tips and advice!
1) Get the Party Started!
What is high school graduation without a big bash at the end of it? Graduating high school is a big achievement and calls for celebration. Be proud of your achievements and celebrate in style to prove it!
2) Thank Your Parents and Teachers
As moody teenagers in high school who think we know best, we find it difficult to see how much our parents do for us and how many personal sacrifices our teachers make to get us through high school with the best possible grades and life prospects. So, this is the time to step back and reflect on these things and thank them for all the opportunities they’ve enabled for you. They’ll appreciate it more than you know!
3) Spend Time with Family and Friends
If you’re graduating high school, you’ll most likely be moving away to attend University very soon. Once you do, your life will never be the same again; your friends will probably all move away to various cities for University and you will no longer live with your parents most of the time. So, before you do move away and everything changes, spend quality time with your family and friends while you’re all living in proximity, because you don’t know when you’ll next have that opportunity again.
4) Start Saving for University
With high school graduation looming, it’s important to start saving for university, regardless of whether you think you have enough already. When you’re living alone while in University, money seems to disappear before you even see it appear in your bank account (welcome to adulthood), so having healthy savings beforehand will save you a lot of grief!
5) Work on Your Maturity and Independence
Graduating high school means you have reached the ripe old age of eighteen, and it’s time to start working on your maturity as well as your independence. Learning simple things like cooking and washing will help you through living alone at University and will enable you to look at the world from a more grown up prospective.
6) Breathe and Embrace the Uncertainties
Graduating high school often means a lot of uncertainty about, well, everything. Suddenly, life seems tumultuous and scary as you ride into the unknown and simple things like your current daily routine and your normal weekend plans are soon to be out of the window. The best thing to do in this situation is breath through the stress and embrace all the uncertainties that are coming your way. Think of it a rite of passage into adulthood!
7) Start Extra Curricular Activities
Extra curricular activities are a great way of relieving stress, while interacting with new people and building skills and experience that will be useful for future job applications and making connections at University. Go with what you love, whether it is volunteering at a local soup kitchen, trying a new sport or taking up knitting. The world is your oyster!
8) Think About Possible Future Career Prospects
While high school is not necessarily the place to start thinking too far ahead into the future, University is! When graduating high school, it’s worth thinking about what subject(s) and activities you’ll delve into at University for the best chance at bagging your dream job once you come out the other end.
9) Learn to Network
Learning to interact well and network with different people will be a very useful skill to have once you start University and later, when you start looking for a job. As the saying goes, job opportunities are often about who you know, not what you know, so if you perfect the art of networking as you approach high school graduation, you’ll open many doors for yourself in the near future.
10) Get Your Driving License
If you haven’t already, getting your driving license is worth the time, energy and money that it takes to acquire. When you go off to University, you may not have the means to get your license, and it will come in handy when you start work, so get it now while you have the opportunity!
