"Alumni, upperclassmen and freshmen all agree that freshman year is the worst year in high school. It isn't academically the hardest year, but the transition between middle school and high school can make it hard," said Kara Findley, 15, a North Central High School freshman.

Most people can remember the summer between their eighth-grade graduation and freshman year in high school as a time of nervous anticipation. They were headed for a larger school with teachers and students they did not know and had worries about whether they would adjust to their new surroundings.

Kara; Marie Albrecht, 14; Meghan Krueger, 15; and Amy Prugh, 14, recently shared with Y-Press their freshman experiences. All four attend North Central and participated in Panther Quest, a one-day summer orientation program for the school's incoming freshmen.

First day

Marie: I don't know why I was nervous. Maybe it's because I knew that I probably wasn't gonna have classes with lots of my friends, and there were gonna be a lot of new people that I hadn't seen at Panther Quest, either.

Kara: I was really slow at making new friends or opening up to new people. (But) my first day of school, I really wasn't that nervous. I was pretty comfortable, and I kind of surprised myself. It was nice to see a lot of people that I knew from my old school and summer gym, and a couple of people that I knew from Panther Quest.

Amy: Panther Quest helped my fears a lot. The Panther Quest facilitators had their shirts on, so if you got lost or anything, you could ask them where to go.

Big adjustments

Meghan: It's very big, and it's overwhelming at first, but once you get into your pattern of where you have to go every day, it's not so bad.

Kara: I wasn't really overwhelmed by its size, but it's pretty loud. "D" hall gets pretty crowded, and you have to kind of like elbow your way through sometimes. But it's pretty fun. The atmosphere is pretty fun.

Marie: I wasn't really prepared. My (eighth-grade) teachers didn't go through grading or anything, and I know my honors science class last year was like a sixth-grade science class, so the transition to this year is really difficult because my biology is really hard.

Amy: You have to make a lot of changes with your friends. A lot of your friends you don't see very much anymore, so you have to make new ones. But you make a lot more just because you have so many more classes and so many different people in your classes.

Did Panther Quest help?

Marie: I think Panther Quest did help me talk to other people because you kind of had to if you wanted to talk to anyone during the day. Otherwise I would have been silent the whole day, and that's no fun. And especially at lunch, because I knew a couple of people in my lunch period and that's it, and they knew other people, so I met new people and I became better friends with some new people.

Kara: We did a lot of stuff. . . . One of them was (a) tour of the school, and that really helped me learn my way around because the school is huge.

Meghan: I liked the scavenger hunt because by then I had figured out where I was going.

Amy: It helped me so much. I met a lot of new people, and I really got to know where things were.

How they feel now

Amy: It's been a learning experience, but it's been a lot of fun just because the teachers are a lot of fun. The teaching style is a lot different . . . it's not so much of a chore to learn. And you get to know people. You can be more of who you are.

Kara: It's a lot different than my private school, Sycamore. . . . I really miss my old school. I really miss the people that I was close to at my old school. It was kind of a hard transition, but it's fine now. I like it.

Meghan: There have been frustrations, but it's not been overwhelmingly bad. But then the frustrations don't make it overwhelmingly fantastic.

Advice to freshmen

Amy: Make sure you keep everything organized because things can get lost very easily, and teachers will not be so lenient about giving you extra days to do them. Also, set aside plenty of time to study for tests or to do homework, because if you don't, that'll hurt you.

Marie: Be on time. You get sent to the holding cell if you're late. You have to give them your ID so they can check you in and so teachers know to only give you 75 percent credit on whatever you missed. . . . You sit there the whole period and it kind of stinks, because if (teachers) give you notes or something, you miss out and you have to get them from somebody else.

Meghan: Go to Panther Quest. Even though they start repeating things at the end and it gets boring, no other thing can better prepare you.

Kara: Take high school seriously. . . . In middle school you might just goof around; it doesn't really matter later. But what grades you get in high school will determine your job. . . . It's just time to get serious and study and actually do your homework.

High school is a lot of fun. I'm not trying to make it sound terrible, but you need to take it seriously.

ASSISTANT EDITORS: Zoe Hayes, 14; Elisabeth Randall, 13; Katie Qualkinbush, 15.

REPORTERS: Austin Golden, 10; Averie Timm, 11.