Many MVHS students have little time to pursue fun activities, go on trips or engage in non-academic endeavors to break away from their tedious schedule. Some students create bucket lists with activities that they want to pursue before the next chapter of their lives.

Many seniors having little time left before the start of college, begin considering what they want to do before fall rolls around. Senior Manasa Ganesh hopes to cross off as many activitiesand events on her bucket list as she can before she moves to Texas for college in September.

“I want to do glass blowing, paint a ukulele, decorate a room, drive to Santa Cruz, get a new hobby,” Ganesh said. “I wanted to see the coral reefs before it dies. [Also], I’m getting a tattoo, buying a lottery ticket, dyeing my hair and going to a concert, getting an ear piercing and then overcoming my fear of zombies.”

While Ganesh hopes to check off most of the items before college starts in the fall, she also set a deadline for her bucket list of 19 things to be completed by the end of 2019. Currently, Ganesh is in the process of fulfilling one of her items on her bucket list: painting a ukulele. While it’s yet to be finished, Ganesh continues to work on her ukulele in the Woodshop room at school and hopes to paint it to meet her deadline. Ganesh has played other people’s ukuleles before and wants to paint Van Gogh’s Starry Night on hers.

So far on the list, Ganesh has conquered her fear of zombies by watching horror flicks, engaged in a new hobby of bullet journaling and purchased a lottery ticket the day she turned 18. Many of the items on Ganesh’s list are small actions she wants to complete now while she has time.

While not a senior yet, junior Sonia Singh also has a bucket list, which, contrary to Ganesh’s, is filled with experiences and trips she wants to complete with her friends rather than new hobbies. As an avid fan of Saturday Night Live, making the trip to New York and going to a live show is on the top of Singh’s list.

“I’ve been a fan since I was a little kid and my parents played it,” Singh said. “I watch it every week and I know all the cast members extremely well and I want to somehow get tickets and watch it live.”

Another integral part of Singh’s list are the activities she hopes to do with her father before heading off the college.

“I want to learn how to fly a plane because my dad has always wanted to do that, but he didn’t have the opportunity,” Singh said. “He wanted to join the Indian Air Force but couldn’t because of back problems, so they didn’t let him join … I guess I’m trying to fulfill that for him and also flying just seems really cool.”

Even though Singh plans to fulfill the items on her list in the coming years, she explains that not planning ahead and making spontaneous decisions on trips or doing new activities also has its benefits.

“I’ve started to realize more recently that there’s a lot of benefits to the ‘go with the flow’ mentality, since planning sometimes ruins the event because I would be planning too much and not having [an enjoyable] experience,” Singh said. “If I didn’t hit something on my bucket list, I wouldn’t be terribly disappointed. I wouldn’t cry if I didn’t go to Comicon. It’s a way for me to remember the things I wanted to do when I was younger and see if I can try to fulfill that later in my life. It’s almost a way to connect with my younger self.”

Junior Audrey Cui has also created a bucket list to complete before graduation and is still adding to it. At the very top of her list is singing karaoke with her firends.

“My friends and I have a lot of songs that we enjoy, like ‘My Heart Goes On’ [and] ‘I Want It That Way,’” Cui said. “[They’re], mostly pop songs [that] were popular when we were in middle school, because it reminds us of our earlier childhood.”

With senior year ending and summer just around the corner, junior Anna Kolesov has also started making bucket lists, one for over the summer, and the other for before graduation. Kolesov’s list includes activities that she wants to do with her family members, friends and some on her own.

“For this summer I have some Russian books I want to read which translates to my life bucket list because I want to speak Russian better,” Kolesov said. “Also, on my life bucket list is skydiving and going on a trip with all of my friends to Europe and then maybe going to Bora Bora.”

Kolesov has multiple bucket lists in order to organize her ideas into logical time frames, as well as remember to do the things she wants to do.

“It gives you something to look forward to because when you get older you get into this routine of having a job and family life and you can’t really do a lot of fun stuff,” Kolesov said. “But if you have a bucket list there’s something you can works towards and completing something on your bucket list can make life more exciting.”