By Jennifer Garcia

What do Mean Girls, Clueless, Grease, Easy A, and The Duff have in common? They are all high school movies that revolve around cliches and do not accurately depict what high school is really like. As a result, freshman may come into high school thinking they will be bugged by mean girls, forced into a friend group cliche (nerds, geeks, jocks, popular girls), or pressured into doing things they don’t want to do. As freshman Abigail Jimenez stated, “The way I pictured high school was in the way Mean Girls presented it, so I was scared.”

In the end, freshman learned that high school is not even close to similar as it is depicted in the movies. They found Animo Pat Brown High School to be a welcoming and comforting school, but also had it’s bad aspects.

As only having seen high school in the movies, freshman came into high school expecting different things. Freshman Sarah Tacho expected high school to be “more mature and drama free.” She found that high school came with newfound drama and conflicts between her classmates, but luckily she did not find herself in the middle of any of the drama.

For freshman Luis Alarcon, he came into high school looking to be challenged. In reality, he said, “It [high school] ended up being somewhat challenging, but not as challenging as I thought it was going to be.”

Coming to a new school comes with both newfound positive and negative experiences. All three freshman agreed that their best experience was getting I meet new people and teachers. They all liked that they got to make friends with people they didn’t see themselves being friends with before. As Sarah expressed, “It’s cool to see everyone’s different personalities.”

However, whenever someone goes, negative experiences are bound to happen. Sarah expressed that she did not like getting lunch giveback for coming a seconds late to school. “It’s not fair,” she stated.

Abigail described her worst experience as, “having to cut some of my friends off because they were not serious about school.” Everyone comes into high school losing a few friends, but comes out with new ones.

Overall, freshman’s first year of high school was different for everyone, but the majority enjoyed it and thought it went by fairly easy. APB did a great job of making them feel comfortable in a new school full of new people and classes they have never seen before. There is more to come for this year’s freshman, just they wait.