Vivica Shaw said that her senior year isn’t as good as she expected, but the reason is because this year everything is virtual. Shaw is missing out on so many experiences that she has dreamed about since elementary school. “The fact that half of my senior year was spent in quarantine is heartbreaking because your senior is the cherry on top to your entire high school experience,” she said. “After this I’m basically an adult so that’s it. I won’t get it back.”
Shaw said that her experience as a freshman was amazing. It was “more freedom, less sketchy, and the older kids were not as mean,” she said. All the fields were open and basketball courts were open to everyone. Her advice to freshmen is “Handle your business. Do what you need to do, so later you can do what you want to do. Trust and believe it’s okay to have fun and to mess around a little bit. It’s your first year of high school that’s what everyone expects you to do. But you don’t want to be that freshman that’s known for being that freshman. You dig?” Shaw wants everyone to be themselves when they enter high school. As she is preparing to leave high school, she hopes to move to New York to pursue her dream of being a fashion designer and entrepreneur. Shaw said that she is influenced by her grandma, cousin and, most importantly, herself.
There has been times where she struggled. Shaw has fallen behind, but has turned it around. Her first two years at Armijo, she was skipping school and not doing work, but in her junior year she figured things out a bit. “Junior year wasn’t bad, but there were times where I would get discouraged,” she said. “Throughout all that, I still managed to thug it out and now I’m on track to graduate.” Shaw got into sports as well. She plays basketball and soccer but since both sports fall under the same season she chose basketball. As she has gotten older, Shaw has started to understand things more clearly. “You have a lot more freedom,” she said. “You get to reminisce about the good ole days and really reflect on how much you’ve grown especially with the people you’ve known for a long time. Plus you get to move on with your life and make decisions for yourself which is the best.”