When students first hear about high school, they are usually very young, and at that age, high school seems like one of the scariest places in the world. There are stories of students turning into adults, people reaching heights of 6 feet towering in the halls and endless hallways winding into wrong turns.

While high school isn’t often glamorous, for most, it’s rarely as bad as it first seems. However, students do face obstacles, sometimes scary ones, during their high school career.

One of the biggest choices made during this time is the people students choose to hang out with. As the common saying goes, people often are who they choose as their friends.

“The worst experience I’ve had in high school so far was having to deal with fake people that wasted my sweet time,” said Paulina Olichineo, sophomore.

Many define “fake people” as those who don’t act like themselves because they feel as if they should act another way to climb up the social ladder.

Lots of people will experience the loss of friendship because their friends are changing or are growing into new people and choosing different interests, values and morals that aren’t always the same as their current friends.

In high school a topic that is often discussed would be drama. Drama, in this sense, means the telling of information in a dramatic, blown-out-of-proportion interpretation of events. Lots of girls and guys can lose friends by creating drama between them, which breeds the feeling of disloyalty and disrespectfulness.

A scary aspect of high school, then, is the loss of former friends as people change and individual priorities transform.

“I had an experience where I lost connection with one of my close friends, and it was difficult to move on and make new friends,” said Junior Sydney Blackmer.

High school students make friends because one fearful idea for many is the idea of being alone–in class, at lunch, in the hallways or at social gatherings.

During freshman year, Junior Ellie Maldonado said she wasn’t very social but had found two people to sit with at lunch.

“There was this one day in the term where [the two friends’] class had a test or something, and their teacher ended up switching the lunch they were going to take for that day, so I was left stranded without the only two people I chose to talk to at lunch. I had no idea what I was going to do for those 35 minutes of lunch,” said Maldonado.

Maldonado continued to explain that she knew she could not stay in the cafeteria “alone with 300 other people in there staring at each other.”

The pressure of being in a room like the cafeteria with a couple hundred people and sitting alone can cause a lot of stress for students.

As a result, sometimes students try to find alternative places to eat.

Maldonado finished her above story by saying, “I had my lunch in my backpack, and I decided to start walking around the school. I did about two laps around the D Wing when I knew I had to come up with some other option because I had to eat my lunch.”

Maldonado ended up going to the bathroom and sitting in a stall to eat her lunch.

“I put my bag on my lap because I knew security guards came in to check every once in a while, and I was terrified to get approached by one of them. I sat down, took my lunch out and never knew it would come to this, but I ate my lunch in the bathroom stall because I was too anti-social to make any new friends and too scared to sit by myself,” said Maldonado.

Making friends can be a difficult task for many in high school and might lead to some devastation, but going outside of a person’s comfort zone and talking to a student about anything that is of a common interest can be beneficial in the end.

Said Blackmer, “[These difficulties with my friends] have actually helped me find some very special people that are in my lives now.”