By Danielle Kolin

I love Harvard-Westlake.

I hadn’t thought about my love for this school until the nostalgia and sentimentality of the end of senior year hit in full force. During the school year, I didn’t talk about the aspects of the school I love. I certainly didn’t hear people talk about how they loved their classes or their extracurricular activities. Instead, my classmates and I tended to complain.
“I hate Harvard-Westlake.”
“I hated junior year.”
“I hate calculus.”
It was easy to succumb to that focus on the negative. Tennis practice in the burning sun for three hours is no fun when you know you have to go home afterwards and study for three tests.
Even Chronicle layout, usually enjoyable, can get tiring by 11 p.m. on Monday night when the newspaper needs to go to press.

But even with those exhausting, stressful moments, for me high school has been enjoyable. Instead of dwelling on the time I spent studying for midterms, AP tests and SATs, I remember the laughter at tennis practice, the lunch trips off-campus, the dancing in Weiler Hall. But at the time, the stressful moments reigned supreme. Only in retrospect do I realize how much I enjoyed my high school years.

One of my friends has a sign in her room. It says, “Here’s what I like: writing (Chronicle, English, creative writing), history. Here’s what I’m not going to worry about: math, science, Latin.”
In college, I want to live in the moment. Like my friend, I want to consciously focus on things I love instead of things I don’t enjoy. I’m not going to complain about the stressful and miserable moments, at least not as much.

This is the sentimental, nostalgic view of a graduating senior with high expectations for college, but it is also more than that. Everything at Harvard-Westlake may seem rosy now from a distance, but rosiness aside, I really did love my experience here. And Harvard-Westlake taught me more than calculus, art history and Spanish — the trying, stressful, exhausting moments have taught me how to enjoy anything and everything, even junior year.