Throughout most students’ childhoods, they have watched many different coming-of-age movies that have influenced their thoughts on high school. Students have developed expectations of high school events such as football games, pep rallies, spirit weeks, homecoming and prom. For most students though, these expectations didn’t live up to their reality.

Movies and shows such as “Mean Girls,” “High School Musical” and “Gossip Girl” create assumptions about how high schoolers treat each other and how confident students will be in who they are and what they are doing.

It’s a common misconception created by the media that high schoolers, specifically upperclassmen, make fun of and bully the freshman and sophomores during the year.

“People usually tell us that the older classes hate us for some reason, so my expectation was that they were going to pick on us and annoy us, but that did not end up being true,” said freshman Natasha Mistry.

Another false reality that is often shown in different shows and movies is how much fun students are always having and how their social lives are at an all time high in high school. These four years can be extremely draining, not only in terms of school work, but socially as well.

“These movies and shows romanticized it way more than it is in real life, and failed to show the hardships of high school,” said senior Diya Parikh.

The way the media incorrectly portrays high school can be harmful when students realize that their life doesn’t look like that. Students should also realize, though, that it’s not always wrong. 

“I also had expectations of different cliques and groups between the students, and that ended up being true,” said Parikh.

It is important to be aware when building expectations for these four years that everything online isn’t always true, and in most situations it is extremely exaggerated or even fake.