About three out of five days a week, I spend an average of about 12 hours at school a day. As high school students, we are passively obligated to take part in extracurricular activities by our parents, teachers, and peers. Before you know it, you just spent the last few years of your life practicing away at your chosen endeavor when in the long run, you don’t even know if you enjoy it or not.

It all starts in seventh grade when you get to choose your electives for the first time. The average student usually picks a foreign language (i.e., Spanish), a fine arts elective of some sort, and the most popular elective: athletics.

I’m going to guess that about 90 percent of the middle school population did athletics because that was the norm, and if you didn’t, then you would get this funny look from all the other pre-teens. I, close-mindedly, was one of those students who tried to be athletic when I, and everyone around me, knew that I was not. But when I enrolled freshman year, I knew this was my chance to break free from all of the running or any form of exercise.

Once you hit high school though, and choose your courses for the year, there is no turning back. Since our school is so small, it’s hard to switch “groups” because after all of the time you spend in your program, you eventually become classified to whatever that activity is. Whether it be debate, cross-country, theater, art, or yearbook, you are now “labeled” with that title.

Even if you want to try something new, it is tough to do so because of how often different programs conflict with timing and dates. High school is our chance to try new things, and to figure out what we like, but it’s kind of hard to do when you are strapped down to one activity, and one activity only.

You end up spending so much time and energy on an activity that you might not even like. But once you have started an extracurricular activity, it is extremely hard to back out or quit without receiving some form of shunning or a cold shoulder.

Luckily for me, I am involved with activities that I truly do enjoy, and hopefully you are as well. Even though they take up a lot of time and require hard work, if you like what you are doing then it’s all worth it in the end.