'I'll get my fantastic ATAR and never look back': Understanding temporality and future orientation for young women in the senior year

This article considers how time is imagined, lived, and desired in young women's lives as they undertake their senior year. Building on an extensive body of scholarly work on this topic, I argue economic and competitive imperatives have intensified for many young people in recent times, manifesting in an educational apparatus that increasingly defines the parameters of success and achievement in terms of self-regulation and personal responsibility. This article draws upon a series of interviews and a- synchronous 'blog' posts from a year-long study of 13 young people engaged in their senior year enrolled in the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) in Melbourne, Australia. It suggests that the intensification, compression, and control of time in educational discourse around the senior year plays a powerful role in self making for young women in particular. For these young women, traditional 'blueprints' for making a life sit alongside and in conversation with a highly individualised understanding of how those narratives might be realised amid a background of significant cultural and social change in Australia. Thus, I suggest that continual self-improvement, and future orientation are positioned as necessary attributes in senior curriculum, and these do significant work in orienting young women's aspirations in modern times.