Football, cheer, and a big crowd on a Friday night: this is not necessarily the universal high school experience; it is not the UPrep experience. Popular culture and what we see around us shapes so much of what we believe, but just because we see or hear about other schools doing things, that doesn’t mean we have to.

UPrep is a college preparatory school. Of course, we are going to focus more on academics, college counseling and doing homework. But high school isn’t the end of your life. Just because you don’t have the same opportunities as someone else, doesn’t mean you have no opportunities at all.

In focusing on what we don’t have at UPrep, whether that’s football games and a packed Pumadome at games, or school spirit, we lose sight of the fact that there are countless opportunities for us to connect with peers in our own community in our own ways.

UPrep has so many different programs and events, unique to us or not, that we have made our own like the Night Market, Global Link, Model UN, Heritage Night and LaunchPad. The core of these is that we get to interact with people from all over the UPrep community, and celebrate what we do. Not only that, but many events have not just students showing up, but parents and friends too; this amounts to hundreds of people in attendance. UPrep has proven time and time again that we can have a community without the Friday night stage. Yet there’s still discussion about what we don’t have, when in reality, we have so much.

If we want those big, hype sports games, we need to motivate each other to go to them. We need to create these experiences for ourselves, and if we don’t put the effort in, it’s not going to happen. UPrep’s sense of community is in everything we do, so if we want more, we have to do more. Invite your friends to your next basketball game, tell your friend about your LaunchPad presentation, and tell them to tell their friends.

Not having a “traditional experience” isn’t necessarily a sacrifice; it’s an investment. UPrep has strong academics, but it’s up to us to create not only a fun high school experience, but a memorable one.

UPrep students still engage in traditional high school experiences. We participate in dances, sports games, parties, and homework, and just because they might look different from the media, or other schools doesn’t make them any less meaningful. We have proven that we can do, and be more already. So we, as UPrep students, shouldn’t be judging UPrep based on what we are not doing; we should be judging ourselves based on what we are doing.