Fellow upperclassmen, our time has finally come. After our arduous years of enduring belittlement from the previous years’ upperclassmen, we now have the privilege of pushing around our generation’s underclassmen for the rest of the school year.

Everyone knows that the moment you become a junior—or better yet, a senior—you gain immense entitlement as you leave the underclassmen and join the upperclassmen. You now have the power to be an absolute jerk to all the freshmen and sophomores in the school, and no one can tell you what to do—as it’s simply undeniable that the gap between the two classes is much too large to ignore.

The moment that sophomore year ends and you become a junior is the moment that you truly become a high-schooler. After all, it’s a known fact that upperclassmen stand far apart from freshmen and sophomores in terms of age and maturity.

Every time I’ve had the displeasure of speaking to a freshman, I wonder how previous years’ upperclassmen could have caught themselves even standing next to me in public. The difference a single year makes in qualifications is so startling that it’s almost impossible to remember how just three months ago, I was in the summer of my underclassmen years too. 

Of course, as underclassmen, they aren’t privy to the specific privileges of those in their third and fourth years of high school. If you see any freshmen roaming the halls lost and looking for their classrooms, make sure you don’t provide any assistance to them at all (but obviously if you see a fellow upperclassman, make sure you even offer to escort them to their classes.) If you see any underclassmen in the lunch lines, remember that this is practically an invitation to shove them out of your way, as upperclassmen should always be served first. No one likes seeing underclassmen running and scurrying through the halls to their classes or to the lunch line.

We have to establish our dominance over these tiny freshmen and sophomores and do whatever we can to put them in their place like the middle-schoolers they are. Of course, any retaliation is simply unacceptable since that is against the unwritten rules of the grade hierarchy, which are basically equivalent to the laws of physics themselves and can thus never be disobeyed.

If you think this is unfair at all, trust me—it’s not. Every high-schooler has gone through this at one point or another in their lives, even me, if you can believe it.

If you do happen to be an underclassman, unfortunately, it is what it is. It’s been this way for centuries now, and the fact that there is a social hierarchy in high school solely based on age is a policy set in stone. This tradition of torment is one that is necessary for a high school to run properly, and for underclassmen to undergo for reasons that are and will continue to be left unknown. As such, it’s something that will continue to be a cycle as long as humanity exists.