HALEY GREEN, Richland

I am a Running Start student from Kamiakin High School attending my second year at Columbia Basin Community College as a full-time student. The stereotypical high school experience is relatively over the minute we sacrificed our youth for a future without the burden of an abundance of student loans.

I speak for most Running Start students when I express the empirical outcome of entering college our junior year. The majority of us have jobs and play sports atop of the work load and have absolutely no time for high school events.

We are too complacent with the outcome of the achievement of having earned our associate's degree a week after graduating with our high school diploma, that none of us would revert back to our previous lifestyles.

Therefore, at the tender age of 17 or 18, most of us know our majors and have gained the ultimate college preparatory experience imaginable.

Our last two years of being kids were spent in lectures and intellectual conversation. I mean not to complain, we chose our fate and gifted ourselves the time to start living our lives beyond adolescence earlier. However, even I question if the life we lost was worth the future we gained.