Senior year is quite often the most bittersweet experience for a high school student. Everything you do is your last, for grade school, at least. It is your last first day, your last homecoming, and your last prom. It is no doubt an incredibly difficult transitional period—but at the same time, it gives you an incredible opportunity to fall into yourself and to realize who you are as a person.
Zeneth Contreras, a 17-year-old senior at Canyon, has been doing exactly that: simultaneously experiencing all these bittersweet moments and falling into who she is.
“I’m mainly just… trying to survive,” she joked when I asked her how her final year of high school has been treating her. Contreras is incredibly ambitious, and those ambitions have definitely been paying off; throughout her high school career, she’s taken a wide array of AP classes, and unsurprisingly excelled at all of them.
Contreras also has high ambitions for college: “I want to be a double major. I want to study Criminal Justice and Psychology.” Contreras has a passion for these two fields—I swear, the look in her eyes she has while she talks about it has the power to make you want to pursue it, too—and she very gleefully told me all about why she wants to follow these specific fields.
It all started when she was assigned a book to read for Canyon’s very own book club, titled “Red Dragon” by Thomas Harris. During the reading of this book, a fire was ignited within her. “This book changed my life,” she said, “I’m serious.” She couldn’t put the book down—she was completely sucked into this world of elaborate crime-solving, crime-scene analysis, and the overall field of criminal justice and everything it entails.
Some schools Contreras has in mind are UC Irvine, University of Maryland, and University of Pennsylvania. “I cannot wait until I’m able to go to college, and to start working on my career path as a criminal profiler in the FBI,” she explained.
Despite the excitement, though, she has experienced many conflicting feelings: “Senior year is a blend of anticipation and nostalgia. There is a feeling of sadness, knowing that this is my last year of high school before jumping into something new. I try to appreciate every little moment I have, from going to football games to taking a test in my AP Literature class.” Even though she is hit with many rather sad emotions, she doesn’t let that stop her from making the most out of her senior year.
Contreras has been doing an extraordinary job at tackling these challenges not only this year, but throughout her whole high school career. She is proving to be more than ready for these new, and even sometimes scary opportunities, but I and all of her loved ones have no doubt that she will continue to excel throughout her college career.
As she said, “The excitement of what’s to come is overwhelming but, at the same time, a welcoming feeling, knowing that new possibilities are at hand.”
