Scrolling through social media on New Year’s Eve, it wasn’t hard for junior Danyelle Constant to see the overwhelming number of posts condemning the year of 2016. Tweets, Tumblr posts, Snapchat stories and Facebook posts all ready to say goodbye to the old year. With the deaths of so many beloved figures, such as actress Carrie Fisher and musician David Bowie, a rather intense presidential election and a large number of shootings and violence, 2016 has been deemed a “cursed year” by many social media users.

Constant agrees that 2016 was not the best year. She was particularly affected by the results of the presidential election and how it caused discrepancies and conflict among friends and family.

When Donald Trump was elected president back in November, students such as Constant began to see the formation of a rather large divide between Americans concerning political views, human rights and trust in each other.

The death of Carrie Fisher, an actress known for her role as Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” franchise, also had an impact on Constant. Since she grew up watching “Star Wars,” the news of Fisher’s death was a bit of a bummer for her.

Despite the amount of trash-talking of 2016 on social media, Constant didn’t let it get to her for very long.

“[The posts affected me] for a short period of time, but I like to think I bounced back and tried to carry on my daily activities and emotions.” Constant said.

Senior Nick Hinkle has mixed feelings about 2016. While he was not personally affected by anything that happened, he feels that the general negativity that surrounded the year rubbed off on him a little bit.

“Personally, I didn’t really have a bad year,” Hinkle said. “But seeing all that other stuff [about 2016] made me look at 2016 as a bad year.”

Hinkle believes that much of the pessimism surrounding 2016 came from the deaths of so many celebrities. He says that because those stars were admired and well-respected, it had a negative effect on people.

While Hinkle thinks 2017 being a good year is all up to chance, he believes people can put in effort to make it better by just changing their outlook and being more positive.

Art teacher Nicholas Vannote didn’t think that 2016 was as bad as everyone made it out to be. However, he did think that the year was long.

“It seemed like it passed very slowly because of all the incessant election stuff,” Vannote said. “But as far as events in my own life, it wasn’t that bad.”

Vannote was particularly disappointed by Bernie Sanders losing the presidential election, but didn’t have much else affect him negatively. Going into 2017, Vannote says he has no idea what this year will be like. He hopes that people will complain less and, in turn, be more positive.

“There were a lot of random, one-off occurrences [in 2016,] so who knows if those will kind of shoot into this year.” Vannote said.

After everything that happened in 2016, Constant hopes that 2017 will be a more promising year. She intends to think more positively and believes she’s already been doing a good job with that.

“I think after everyone’s negativity and pessimistic attitude towards 2016, there needs to be some sort of positive change,” Constant said. “So, you’ve gotta start somewhere.”