In anticipation of October’s Halloween hullabaloo, Upper School students were warned of the limited capacity of parking spots on campus the morning of the 31st. For those of us who were unable to be dropped off by a parent, we were advised to arrive hours before classes began in order to secure our parking spots, a task that proved a telling wake-up call to many Upper School students. 

Vested with the power of a driver’s license, teenage drivers tend to stretch the bounds of prompt arrival. Why wake up early when you can roll into the parking lot at 8:25, do a drive-by at advisory check-in, and make it to class just as the clock strikes 8:30? As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility, although for most student drivers, their emboldened auto-autonomy comes with a lack thereof.

Student driving treads the fine line of chaos and order, maturity and immaturity, and joy and heartbreak— all key components of the teenage experience. And what better place encapsulates the teenage experience than the student parking lot, where all these elements come to fruition in a dazzling, trafficky coalescence. 

Consider every high school rom-com ever, every coming-of-age film to grace the silver screen. All have one glaring commonality: the invaluable role of the student parking lot. Just look at Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or 10 Things I Hate About You— emblematic films of American adolescence. Here, the initial jailbreak and ultimate confession that drive the films’ stories take place in the student parking lot, underscored by a feel-good alt-rock song and the sentiment of teenage bliss.

Whoever’s idea it was to have hundreds of inexperienced drivers sandwiched together, navigating a football field length of concrete from the early hours of the morning to the fading light of the evening may have been a bit overzealous in the order of their design. Every student has squeezed into a parking spot at a near 45° angle, raced against the clock to get to class, or coasted into the lot on the mere fumes left in their gas tank. Each worst-case-scenario— leaving the sunroof open when it rained, waking up ten minutes before class starts, or finding your car battery dead with no one around to help you jump it— certainly leaves its mark. 

Still, the student parking lot is far more than just a holding pattern for driving-related woes, for through its challenges and struggles comes unmatched camaraderie. The joy of realizing that everyone has racked up a tardy or two in their day or that everyone else hates driving on the freeway does wonders to calm the nerves of anxious student drivers. The student parking lot takes on many roles in the lives of the student body. Symbolic of strategy, courage, culture, and society, the parking lot can be defined not by what it is, but how it makes the students feel. The student parking lot is the mass exodus on sunny afternoons staring down a week of vacation. It is the relief of a BPL Starbucks run for a senior navigating college applications. It is the excitement in the air walking back from a home game win. It is homecoming posters, birthday balloons, and a finished project for an AP class. Marked by hang tags on rearview mirrors and painted circles beneath bumpers, the student parking lot is a haven of spirit, community, and growth.