According to the Wake County Traditional School Calendar, the school year typically comes to a conclusion at the start of June with the ultimate conclusion being the High School Graduation ceremony following. Most people follow this traditional schedule for the full year, but there are a few students each year who decide to speed up the graduation process.
Those who decide to speed up the process are what we call early graduates. When people graduate early, they make the choice to graduate high school at an earlier point in their careers. The most popular early graduation periods are after the first semester of their senior year or after their junior year of high school.
To graduate early, there aren’t many requirements but the few aspects that are required are somewhat difficult to accomplish. Obviously, to graduate early, you must meet or exceed the required amount of credits to graduate. On top of that, you must obtain approval from your counselor. Once you graduate early, you lose many benefits of being a student at the school. Some of these benefits include not being able to participate in extracurricular activities, bus transportation, the assisted lunch program, and not being permitted to be on campus without being registered as an approved visitor.
Students that make the decision to graduate in January are given the option to participate in a graduation ceremony in January or to participate in the main graduation ceremony in June. We spoke to Baneet Singh, a senior at Panther Creek, who plans to graduate early and attend North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Singh said that he made the choice to walk the stage in June, also adding “I want to be with my people”. Singh made the decision to graduate early so that he could get a head start on his social life and advance his career goals.
Many students that graduate high school pre-maturely do so because they know that the career that they wish to pursue may take additional university education. Some students also chose this route so they could take extra time for their gap year. Edsel Withers, also a student at Panther Creek graduating early, said that one of the factors that led to him going through the early graduation process was so he could spend extra time expanding his portfolio during a gap year before applying to colleges. Many early graduates share the same reasons on why they want to graduate early, but a very large portion of the high school population in America chooses to go down the traditional graduation path- fewer than 3% of students graduate early!
Even though most choose to graduate traditionally, the few students that chose to graduate early pave a great path for success in their future careers. Students lose many benefits of being a high school student but they are confident in their ability to make the right decision. Whether it’s entering college early or taking a gap year in between, our early graduates at Panther Creek are ready for whatever comes their way and we wish them good luck from PCNN!
