Hitting the road: Jeffrey’s 30

Jeffrey Kovar

It has been four years since I sat in the Don T. Haynes Theatre and filled out my freshman choice sheet wrong. I wasn’t paying attention to the form, instead chatting with friends about what classes to put. The nervousness and excitement of finally reaching high school overcame me, and in my excitement, I put my first and last name in the wrong spots. Though these were minor mistakes that were easily fixed with a quick pen-scratch-out, this first blunder in high school perfectly encapsulates what my LASA career was: a sense of overwhelming overconfidence and knowledge torn down by mistakes based on previous assumptions.

I thought I knew what to expect from high school. Years of watching The Disney Channel should have given me all the knowledge I needed to survive, but unfortunately “High School Musical” was not the survival guide I needed to get through this jungle of a school. Middle school was even less of a help when trying to navigate through these past four years. I thought I knew how to shove my way through a crowd, but after four years of trying to get through the fine arts doorway, I realized I should never visit New York.

Everything I had heard about LASA made me think it would be similar in workload to Kealing, but I was sorely mistaken. My ninth grade nights were spent writing English essays, scribbling down geometry homeworks and skimming through world geography readings. The workload became overwhelming, and unfortunately freshman me actually thought that these assignments all mattered. I toiled away working on my homework, sacrificing my sleep and personal life in the effort to get 85 percent on busy work. One of my many regrets from high school was spending too much effort on meaningless assignments instead of taking a day off and going to see the Art Institute of Chicago with Ferris Bueller.

The first two years of LASA jarred me from my preconceived notions of my mind had constructed high school to be like. I knew there wouldn’t be any impromptu singing and dancing (was actually wrong about that), but I did think there would be more “Breakfast Club” character cliches. I thought that as a senior, I would feel a lot bigger, but high school has come and gone and I’m still 5 feet 8 inches.

Though a lot of my high school movie tropes were destroyed by the reality of LASA, I am thankful that some of my preconceived notions of what high school would be like. I managed to stay away from the petty “Mean Girls” esque drama that I worried would consume all of my time. I am very relieved to look back on my time at LASA and realize how little time I spent on gossip. All the movies made highschool seem like it would be a cliquey abyss that would be the death of my social life. I was once again pleasantly surprised learn that people at LASA are actually pretty nice and open to meeting new people.

Despite what the movies have tried to teach me, LASA has been a pleasant surprise. I don’t know what kind of excitement college will bring, but thankfully I know it probably won’t be like “22 Jump Street.”