The Student News Site of Malvern Preparatory School

Friar's Lantern

The Student News Site of Malvern Preparatory School

Friar's Lantern

The Student News Site of Malvern Preparatory School

Friar's Lantern

That’s Just the Wave, Waves Don’t Die

SeniorColumns-Bunn

Relationships come and go, but the ones I’ve built at Malvern last a lifetime

Thinking all the way back to the beginning of my freshman year at Malvern, I hit the ground running. Honors Chemistry with Captain Boyce was my first class at Malvern, and an innocent freshman like me couldn’t have possibly known what was in store for me. Even though I was just as nervous as the sophomores in my class, I went into that chemistry room with the same attitude I came into Malvern: eyes, brain, and heart wide open.

Balancing the steady flow of lab reports with home life was one of the first of many trials during my time at Malvern. For the most part, Capt. Boyce is only one out of the many people at Malvern that have encouraged me to push myself. Challenging myself has always been my end goal, even if it meant a few more late nights.

I started to take on more and more responsibilities as I went through my time at Malvern. Starting with the BFC, I later joined the Academic Competition team, the Mathletes team, and even spent an interesting six weeks this year helping to build a robot.

As I started to become more involved at Malvern, it become an uphill battle to keep all of my commitments and responsibilities in check.

Part of me wondered if each new challenge was going to be the one to break me. At the same time, I knew that I wanted to at the very least try before I threw in the towel. Redefining my limits has become one of the most important skills I have learned here at Malvern, and I am happy to say that I have not found that upper limit yet. Though I can’t say that I was perfect at everything I tried to do, I know for a fact that I gave it my all.

Over time, I started to at least get a sense of how all of my interests were to ultimately become part of what I was passionate about. For every triumph, I gained a small piece of the greater picture of who I was.

This search for where my own limit was reached a critical point around my junior year. Having signed up for a litany of challenging classes, balancing academics with crew and the Chronicle became a Herculean feat. Even though Mr. Roper swept me away in a sea of vocabulary words and readings from The Canterbury Tales, I had to constantly pushed through my own mental blocks and I came out of junior year scathed, but alive.

Lately, as my time at Malvern starts to come to a sudden end, I have started to appreciate the challenges Malvern has given me. I remember wanting to fast-forward past all of the tests and due dates. But now, I wish that I could have slowed down time to fully appreciate the best parts of Malvern. Extensive self-reflection is one of the many skills that I wished that I developed early on. Realizing your entire path in life during high school is near-impossible. Allowing yourself to pursue all your interests to become part of your passion is a much more rewarding way to approach your time at Malvern. Life rewards those who constantly pursue every opportunity, even if it ends in failure.

Above all, I would just like to say thank you to those who have supported me. Grinding away at an article the night before deadline has always been worth it to me because of the inevitable conversation that arose as a result of each month’s publication. Everyone has been incredibly supportive of both me and my ideas. Never in a million years would I have thought that I would feel the most at home at Malvern. Despite a few stumbles along the way, I feel like Malvern has allowed me to become a completely different person than I started at.

As Colum McCann said in Let the Great World Spin, “The person we know at first…is not the one we know at last.”

Chris’s BFC stories

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