A typical opening scene from a movie about high school: teens are sprawled across the lawn on the first day of school. To your left, you have the cheerleaders; their skirts are short and almost all have blonde hair. To your right, you see the science geeks, usually surrounding something fizzling or exploding. On the stairs, you see the jocks; big football players in letterman jackets tossing around a ball. Near the bike racks are the scene kids—all dressed in black, and usually chain smoking.

All of the different cliques are separated and there is no intergroup chatting. The jocks and cheerleaders torment the science nerds, and the scene kids are almost always too high to care about what’s going on. Let’s not forget about the band geeks, with their frizzy hair and braces-filled smiles. They were the ones always getting pushed into lockers. You were only safe if you were popular.

After watching all those movies, I was terrified—what was high school going to be like? Everyone always told me not to worry. “High school really isn’t like the movies, so don’t worry.” Nerds don’t get stuffed into lockers, kids aren’t really segregated into different cliques, and no one is picked on. Even while in high school, my friends would always claim that our school was nothing like school was in the movies.

After a long four years, I can actually say that, yeah, high school is like that. Perhaps it isn’t as extreme as the movies portray it to be, but it’s there. Kids congregate to other kids that are like them; the music kids hang out with the music kids, the football players sit with the cheerleaders, the stoner kids sit with each other.

Groups higher up in the social pyramid bully those below them, and so much judgment is passed on from clique to clique. The gossip is horrible; it spreads like wildfire. I knew business about people I didn’t even know.

College has taught me to be grateful to be past my high school years. Before college, I didn’t think of high school as segregated as it actually is. I thought that because it wasn’t as severe as the movies made it seem, high school wasn’t like the movies at all. But I was wrong, because now I have something to compare it to.

There will be cliques no matter where you go, but at least now, every one is friendly toward each other. There is mutual respect between almost everyone in the student body. If I had to guess why, I’d say it’s because no one wants to go back to the way it was in high school.