September 1st, 2025
Dear Diary,
I’m writing this in the final stretch of my last ever Term 3 of my last ever year of school. This month, I’m turning 18. Next month, I’ll be saying goodbye to the place I’ve spent the last five years. I know from the musical Rent that in a full year there are 525,600 minutes (five years being 2,268,000), but I haven’t exactly been keeping track of how many minutes I’ve spent in the four proverbial walls of Pakūranga College.
Every year level has its ups and downs. In Year 9, you’re new and still in that awkward stage of adolescence — no matter how hard you try to hide it, you aren’t fooling anyone. By Year 10, you’re still extremely awkward and uncool, but you at least have the Year 9s to look down upon. Year 11 is the confused middle child of your high school journey: not serious enough to justify crashing out over your maths homework, but not easy enough to remain a cruisy ride. Year 12 thrusts you into the deep end, but you’re finally a young adult.
With all of that being said, none of these stages of your high school journey is ever as daunting as Year 13. Younger readers, find yourself forewarned as to what is to come. The clock is ticking down to university applications, university scholarships, moving out, and figuring out what the heck you’re going to do with your life. The weeks start running out, and the quarter-life crisis kicks in. Forget what you’re going to do with your life. What have you been doing with your life? TV and movies promised parties, relationships, and mischievous nights out. A lot of us find ourselves having never experienced anything that truly feels like the real deal, and spent our adolescence studying and going to the mall over and over and over again. If you have lived the picture-perfect high school experience, then good for you. If you haven’t, fear not: your life has only just begun.
The great thing about being a certified nerd is how much opportunity I’ve had to meet people from outside of school. It may be that there is bias in my sampling method, but a lot of people that I’ve met from all around Aotearoa have found themselves in similar positions to us losers and hermits alike. Speaking to people who have left high school, I’ve discovered two things to be true:
High school is a huge part of your life.
But it doesn’t define you.
Our world won’t end when we leave high school, but it will be different. We’ll be surrounded by different people, some of us living in completely different places. Who you are today is shaped by all of the experiences of your past, but you do not have to be the same person tomorrow. You can go from being the quiet kid reading in the corner to a party animal if you really want to, but if you haven’t done so already, is that really what you want? Just because your interests haven’t led you to a cliche high school experience doesn’t mean that you’re boring. It just means you’re you.
What I’ve realised in my reflections on my high school experience is that in all the time I’ve spent thinking about what I haven’t done over the past years, there’s been a complete and utter lack of time thinking about what I have done. This is where my self-indulgent, not-entirely-profound personal reflection ends, and my letter as the editor begins.
I submitted my first piece to The Pakage in Term 1 of my first year of high school. The editor at the time was running a writing competition, and I entered without thinking much of it. I was shy, a bit weird, and not very confident in my writing (if I’m being honest, the use of the word “was” might be incorrect here), but I decided to submit a piece anyway. It was a poem, and somehow it won. I think I won a gift card and a bar of chocolate.
From there, I kept writing for The Pakage. I didn’t think anything of my involvement until I was asked at the end of Year 10 to become the editor from 2023 onwards.
The past three years of editing The Pakage have been a wild ride. I’ve read some amazing pieces, and have really enjoyed the opportunity to see how much talent Pakūranga College has to offer. I couldn’t have done it without the incredibly supportive team that continues to support our student publication. Mrs Side has been a terrific teacher in charge, and Mrs Edwards and Carlos Norton have done a fantastic job putting The Pakage together every term and sending it out to you all. It’s a tough job, especially when I email them the outline during the last week of term. Acknowledgement is also to be given to the team of junior editors who have supported me this year: Cossar Salesa-Lee, Connor Hart, Sandra Thompson, and Abby Coates. I know that while I am sad to say goodbye to something that has been such a huge part of my life for the past five years, I am leaving The Pakage in able hands.
To all the Year 13s leaving in a few weeks, good luck for the future! To everyone else, keep on pushing through.
Rest in peace Pakūranga McDonald’s.
Cerys Gibby – Year 13
