A demon’s dour bellow disrupts you from your sleepless daze.

You’re famished, disoriented, and gasping for breath. Hardly a sound can be heard beyond the closed wooden gates, but that’s none of your concern; you must defeat this beast before your 6 hour sleep cycle kicks into high gear. Even if you do manage to conquer the mystical malignance this night, assuming that you don’t put it off for another day, there are tougher, fouler, more frustrating monsters expecting you from around the corner.

You don’t know exactly why you subject yourself to this gauntlet, but it’s been a ritual of yours for a majority of your life. Homework, sports, and other such business can have that kind of effect on you; juggling between success, social life, and enough sleep.

This becomes exponentially true if you’re like me: 4 daunting AP classes, a Senior Hero project, and a time-consuming music extracurricular.

Even as summer finally arrives mid-fall, in the debilitating heat of the day and the discomfort of the night, you must congratulate yourself: another milestone has been crossed in your high school career. By now, it is understood (hopefully) how the FTHS system works; it is a strange system, I agree, but it most definitely works. A school does not reach the top 20 schools in California without an effective system to drive it towards that goal.

Yet still it will be asked of us and of our staff: what can we do better? What can we do to top our own 906 API and Oak Park High School’s 908?

Even if a lack of sports and the level of school patriotism can leave much to be desired, FTHS does a commendable job in engineering a learning environment of such stature, not only in pursuit of knowledge and the prospects of college but also to assist the community itself in extraordinary ways.

We participate in blood drives that save people’s lives.

We have the capacity to complain about things we feel strongly about, whether it’s in a statewide debate tournament or in classroom I109 every Thursday for PAAC.

We waved goodbye to our luscious locks of hair for the good cause of cancer patients last year.

Our vision has even expanded across the Atlantic Ocean to help underprivileged children have an actual schoolhouse (and, with it, textbooks) for their education in Lungi, Sierra Leone.

Even if some of us choose not to be directly involved in these events, we have consolidated a considerable reputation and have become part of something amazing by just being here. This isn’t just because of the teachers, or the staff, or even Mr. Bova himself. FTHS has come this far because of its students. Us. Teachers merely open the door towards success; we are the ones who are more than willing to enter through. But why enter in the first place?

This school is comprised of a people who have chosen (willingly, most of the time) to affix themselves to the age-old routine of jumping through hoops for the amusement of the College Board. We subject ourselves to this arduous task because we are driven to as students.

I’m not sure if you’ve realized this, but there are a great number of students here who must achieve great lengths to even arrive at school; students from Ojai, Santa Paula, and even Oxnard must allocate their money solely to the gasoline (or bus fares) it takes to fulfill their morning/afternoon commute.

There are so many more options in their own city that they have easier access to, but they chose to come here. They could have made their own life easier by settling for Buena or Ventura, but they chose to spend their money on a school notorious for its academic rigor, cafeteria food, and pervading nerdiness. Why?

FTHS students exist for many purposes but for one outstanding reason: to conquer anything that stands in our way towards success, may that be a high school degree, college, university, or grad school. What we do here boasts the aura of greatness that exists not within school walls but within ourselves. Behind the fiery breath of our mascot, there is pride. Though it’s mostly unspoken pride at best, it’s still pride.

The September swelter is over. You are tired, breathless, and again you bewail as the next beast bursts into the arena, splintering the wooden gates. But you don’t despair: you are ready, perhaps eager. Any day is a fine day for monster hunting.

Photo: Trenton Pham isn’t the only student bogged down with schoolwork and extracarricular activities at Foothill. Photo by Lauren Parrino of The Foothill Dragon Press.