A “shared memory” and a “shared experience” is how senior Siddharth Mishra describes senior trips, recalling how his journey to Lake Tahoe was the last time he was together with his closest friends before they will move on to their separate college lives. For his upcoming summer trip to Honolulu, Mishra hopes that the trip will be memorable. 

“This will be the last time we’re ever going to be together,” Mishra said. “For these six days, we are just going to be us [before] we go to colleges all across the country. I don’t think we’re ever going to have a moment where we’re going to be as closely connected.”

Senior Roma Hashemi shares that planning and prepping are essential components to successful senior trips. Through outlining the finances of her trip to Bend, Oregon, Hashemi was able to display her finance management capabilities to her parents. 

“The first thing we did was [book an] Airbnb that we stayed in and based [all the planning] around that,” Hashemi said. “Another part was food. There were six of us so we split up into groups of two and each night a different group was responsible for making dinner. We really wanted to focus on making meals at home or packing lunch ourselves when we went on hikes or skiing because we were already spending a lot of money on Airbnb.”

For Mishra, planning also made the trip a better experience as he describes that he and his friends did a variety of activities, with the most memorable being a road trip to the Tahoe area during which they spent hours-listening to music, talking and looking out of the window.

“We drove to Tahoe from [Cupertino] on Friday morning and that was a three hour drive,” Mishra said. “There were 11 of us, so we took two cars that night, [and] we explored Truckee [while] it was snowing. We built a snowman and went to the frozen lake. The next day we went to Northstar [ski resort], [and because] it was the first time I skied with my friends, it was extremely fun to ski the whole day. [In] the next morning we hung out at the house, ate breakfast, ate lunch and then we drove back.”

Senior Vaishnavi Suresh, who went to San Diego with friends in March of this year, says senior trips should revolve around the experience with friends rather than the location itself.  

“It’s a really valuable experience thinking about what you’re [going to do] and who you’re going with instead of where you’re going with going,” Suresh said. “[My friends] were thinking about random, but really cool places like Mexico and Hawaii, which were completely out of our budget. But sometimes, you can go to [places like] Santa Cruz and [still] have a really good time. It’s really about the company and the activities that you do with the company. For people who are on the fence about it, 100% I recommend going on a senior trip.”