About

Senioritis is a colloquial term for students who are about to graduate who exhibit symptoms of distraction, restlessness and laziness.

Origin

According to Merriam-Webster^[1], the first known use of Senioritis was in 1907. They define the term as "an ebbing of motivation and effort by school seniors as evidenced by tardiness, absences, and lower grades."

Spread

Early newspaper archives for The New York Times,^[2] The LA Times^[5] and the Washington Post^[4] reveal the epidemic has been reported on throughout the 20th Century.

On November 11th, 2004, Urban Dictionary^[3] user Joe C. defined senioritis as "a crippling disease that strikes high school seniors. Symptoms include: laziness, an over-excessive wearing of track pants, old athletic shirts, sweatpants, athletic shorts, and sweatshirts. Also features a lack of studying, repeated absences, and a generally dismissive attitude. The only known cure is a phenomenon known as Graduation." The definition has received over 6,000 upvotes an 700 downvotes in 15 year.

Lazy College Senior

Lazy College Senior is an advice animal image macro series featuring a young man with short disheveled brown hair drinking a pint of beer. The images are typically captioned with unmotivated statements or behaviors that are associated with burnt out college students during their final year of school, a phenomenon commonly known as “senioritis.” The character can be seen as the antithesis of College Freshman. The original image comes from a stock photo found on Photos.com^[6] titled "Young Man Drinking Beer At Outdoor Pub" (shown left). The first instance of the series surfaced on November 7th, 2011, when Redditor ikfotsur submitted an image macro titled "Lazy college senior"^[7] with the caption "5 minutes late to class / skip entire day" (shown right). The post reached the front page of the r/adviceanimals subreddit, accumulating 9,602 up vote and 510 comments prior to being archived.

#Senioritis

In March 2019, High School seniors began using the hashtag #senioritis to post videos to TikTok of themselves fooling around at school or getting distracted. On March 28th, @joshua.camden posted a video of himself getting distracted (shown below, left). the video has gained over 36,400 likes and 2,000 shares in a month. In late April @nuygooo and @datboiiimike uploaded videos oh high school friends fooling around at school (shown below, right). The videos gained over 23,400 and 28,400 likes respectively.

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/6673560941654707461

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References