Middle School is often a time in every nostalgic senior’s life that is looked back upon with varying degrees of regret. This list below was compiled by the Media Office seniors to include their own personal vendettas with their 2008 selves. The below middle school trends are in no particular order (because they are all equally atrocious).

• Wearing jeans to a middle school dance: I don’t know about you, but for my first middle school dance I was guilty of this fashion faux pas. All the girls got together at someone’s house to do our hair and makeup for the big night. We all went to dinner together and then showed up to the dance in our jeans. I know no girl would be caught dead at a dance in jeans these days, but back in middle school it seemed like the best option. Whether you paired them with a new pair of Jack Rogers or your favorite Sunday flats, you thought you were the coolest girl in the room.
• Wearing pukka shell necklaces: Coming back to school with a pukka shell necklace after a family vacation whether it was to Atlantic Beach or somewhere a bit more tropical, was the only acceptable way to return. It let everyone know that you had been somewhere warmer than Rocky Mount. For anyone that had one, it rarely came off unless your mother forced you to remove it.
• Not washing your gym clothes: Everyone remembers their P.E. uniforms, the gray t-shirts with the blue athletic shorts. I’m sure everyone also remembers the stench that usually came along with them. Boys tried to cover theirs up with a bottle of Axe, while girls usually were pretty good about taking them home on the weekends to be washed (except you, Catherine Coats). Everyone’s P.E. lockers usually contained a pair of dirty gym clothes with a pair of socks or two (probably dirty too) and even smellier shoes.
• Carrying a purse: Very rarely do you see a high school girl walking down the halls with a purse, but back in middle school, it was even rarer to see a girl without one.  The cool thing in middle school was to have the biggest purse with the most stuff in it. Why did we think we needed to carry around almost everything we owned around school on a daily basis?
• Trying too hard to fit the trends: Everyone knows middle school is a time where kids try (awkwardly) to make friends that you hope will last a lifetime or at least until graduation. Usually this entails doing all you can to fit in. This includes following all the trends, even if you thought they were weird.
• Decorating your locker: Back to school time usually means going to Target or Office Depot and picking up basic binders and folders, but for a middle schooler, it is so much more than that. For a middle schooler, it means going to those stores and picking out the coolest binders, folders, pens, and locker supplies they can find. Locker decorations for boys usually just meant throwing a few shelves in there and being done, but for girls, it means picking out coordinating locker shelves, printing out pictures of your favorite summer memories with your friends, and there is even the occasional mini disco ball.
• Relationships: Now as seniors, we probably all look back at our middle school “relationships” and laugh, but as a middle schooler who you are texting can be just as important to you as what you get on a test. Middle school relationships usually consist of your friend telling his friend that you like him and that he should ask you out. Once the relationship begins, so do the basic middle school texts: “Hey”,  “What are you doing?”, “Cool. Same.”  You’re lucky if your relationship makes past a week or two.
• PiCnIkInG your photos: Everyone remembers the photo editing app on Facebook where you could add “cool” filters, text, and stickers to your pictures.  Whether you made them for yourself or for your closest friends, everyone was sure to have a profile picture or two of you and your friends with a clever caption pasted on it (shout out to Ashley Bissette for making me a sweet one in 6^th grade).
• Bad haircuts- Mullets, bowl cuts, side ponytails, and using gel are all side effects of being a middle schooler. Girls walked around with their high ponytails on the sides of their heads like they owned the hallways. Boys had their signature styles too. Every class was sure to have a boy or two (more like every boy) with the classic bowl cut and Justin Bieber swish. There was also the occasional boy with short hair that gelled his hair to look like Edward Cullen.
• Braces: It’s an inevitable part of almost everyone’s life and clear braces Melbourne usually come during the glory days of middle school. Middle school lunches were filled with kids covering their mouths as they chew to make sure no one saw the food they had stuck in their braces. And everyone had to get the colors of their favorite teams for their rubberbands.