Photo by Katherine Powell

Bella Modderman, lists items to keep from senior year.

Senior year.
The last year of firsts. The last year with your peers. The last year to make high school memories last a lifetime. Enjoying high school events comes easy, but remembering them months, even years afterwards, means cloudy memories of going out to eat at IHOP after a football game, instead of remembering the hype of the actual game. Senior year dominates the books, here’s six senior scraps to keep hidden away to relive high school:

Newspaper from the Day of Graduation
Find the newspaper from the day you graduate, because who knows how long newspapers will be around. Plus, see what news goes on in your town. Find a state or national newspaper, see what leaders of this country were thinking. Looking at old newspapers and clippings becomes a timeless way to preserve a memory and encourage a smile. Yet these same newspapers and memories present as very fragile artifacts, and they just won’t hold up very well over the years if they never got stored away.

Sporting Event Ticket Stubs
Sports: the most vulnerable activity to evolution. New rules and regulations in 100 years could completely change the way people see sports today, but as far as traditions go, high school football in Texas beats out all other states for the hype of the coming season. However if you attend a university with no football team, high school football and other sporting events may have been your last shot at having school spirit and supporting your home team.

College Acceptance Letters
Getting accepted to college: the relief of where you will continue your secondary education lifts off your shoulders and you’re ecstatic. All of those late nights spent studying for your SAT and ACT, the early mornings and late afternoons spent in tutoring to better yourself and the tears shed when you’ve torn open the letter to see “Congratulations,” following “Dear Senior.” To remember the look of outstanding joy on your parents face when they find out all those years of you complaining about school paid off. Following the look of joy comes the look of despair when your parents remember the cost of college tuition, but hey, you’re going to college! Remember those joyful moments with your parents.

Photos
Photos last longer than a blurry memory. Keep a few photos of you with your friends, family and teachers to decorate your brand new dorm with. Once college gets started, life gets hectic, leading to never seeing your friends from high school. Leaving your friends for a different college, your friendships will inevitably end, but the memories you have with them don’t have to. Keep the photos around to look back on the good times you had with the people you love, and the people who inspired you.

Graduation Cords/Tassel
Keep your cords as reminder of the hard, nail biting work high school was. You may only graduate Magna Cum Laude once in your life, so getting rid of your cords feels like getting rid of your achievements. College does have graduation cords, if you graduate with honors in high school and college, show off how intelligent and hardworking you continued to be.  

Letters
Letters may seem outdated now, but imagine in ten years when you’re looking back at your high school career the night before your ten year reunion. Keeping letters you wrote to your future self or letters your parents wrote to you throughout high school provides an easy way to look back on who you were and what type of person you developed into. Read back to what your favourite teachers thought about you, but also read back and see what you thought you would do with your life, where you thought you would go to college and what your career would be. Compare who you wanted to be with what you became.