Seniors filled the Green and PAC cafe, celebrating their college decisions on Friday at lunch. Students wore clothing representing their future colleges, took photos, and signed posters with their destinations.
“It’s a really good capstone that brings the whole class together,” senior Zachary Quintana said. Quintana will attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall. The wide range of colleges on display helped students heading to the same schools connect and share their excitement for the future. “We are a community of people that are all going to Berkeley, and it’s just fun to show how far we’ve come,” senior Isaac Chuang said.
Chuang poses wearing his University of California-Berkeley hoodie.
For many seniors, what they wore did not match their initial decisions. “Right before I got the notification from Berkeley, I was thinking I was gonna go to USC,” Chuang said. Other students share similar surprises. “I was committed to a different college and so I was shocked when I got in [to UCLA],” senior Addison Finn said.
Inside the PAC cafe, students filled out posters labeled ‘#MAHSDestination Day’ and ‘Taking my next steps to:’ writing where they were headed after graduation. Once they were done, seniors taped their posters along the walls of the cafe. Outside the cafe, other students wrote messages on the windows, sharing advice, words of encouragement, and hopes for what will come next. “It’s so fun to see where everyone’s gonna be next year, and we can all come together to celebrate,” Finn said.
Many students value Destination Day as it marks the end of a major chapter. Students get to take pride in their next steps and recognize how much they have changed since freshman year or even since the beginning of senior year.
