Victoria Kirkham, Opinion Manager
I’ve written and rewritten this reflection over and over; gathering your entire high school career in front of you and deciding how to wrap it all up is intimidating. It’s fitting that TMP will see both my first and last published writing on campus.
Before I get into the sentimentality that inevitably comes with any kind of senior reflection, I feel like I should mention one thing, because it’s what I would have wanted to hear: Milton is hard. It’s really hard—academically, socially, in practically any facet of school you could possibly think of. I don’t hear enough people—especially seniors, with the rose-tinted glasses we all put on as the senior project period begins—actually acknowledge the uniquely-Milton brand of stress and overwhelm to which we all either accustom ourselves or fail. This environment is in many ways one of Milton’s strengths. It teaches academic resilience, and gives us learning opportunities not afforded to many, particularly in high school. Yet it is in this environment—which as I see it has become harmfully competitive—that we fail to look too closely at the often-repeated motto of this very place.
“Dare to Be True” means unapologetically being yourself, and yet we all constantly try to be people who are more impressive, or more intellectual, more experienced, or more cool, than we ourselves are. Somewhere along the way, it became better to look like you know what you’re doing than to actually know it. Yet we do this at the detriment of our own learning and socioemotional growth. At the end of the day, we aren’t in the workplace; we’re in high school. My biggest advice to anyone—and, of course, take this with as many grains of salt as you please—is to become comfortable being the one who asks the clarifying question, or admits to not understanding something, because that is the way that we truly learn. Be the village idiot while you can, because there is very little to lose by asking now.
On the topic of having little to lose, I came into Milton having never written an article in my life. Taking the risk of applying for TMP (and believe me, with the quality of my application they certainly took a chance on me) was one of the best things I’ve done for myself. At risk of sounding cringey, I believe that journalism is a way to ‘be true’; vulnerability, at least for me, has always been surprisingly easier to write and broadcast to the student body than to speak aloud. Take advantage of your time here; it goes by quickly.
Finally, with this being the year that AI took publications by storm, it’s more important than ever to preserve humanity. Much of what we have to learn comes, in fact, from others. At the Persky awards this year, poet, author, and journalist Dan Chiasson told us to become comfortable with the inefficiency between inspiration in writing—the gaps in time where one pauses to think, whether for minutes, days, or years. But, he said, “you are not on your own: you have your mind for company, and you have each other.” My core academic memories and greatest moments of learning at Milton aren’t me sitting in front of a computer asking questions of an LLM, but rather are moments where I asked that question of that teacher, or bounced an idea off a classmate, or discussed that book we read in class over dinner with friends. Don’t give up your humanity so easily. These moments matter.