YIKES, IT’S JUNIOR YEAR

Katie Phail | ’20-’21 Director of Fundraising

Hey guys!!! Just checking back in with everyone to make sure quarantine is going alright for everyone and to give some (hopefully) helpful tips for rising juniors. Junior year is known to be the most intense year of high school since that's when you need to start becoming more serious about your future and make preparations for college. It can be a really intimidating and stressful year because there are so many different things that you are expected to do well for college. As a junior this year, there were many things that I wish I had known beforehand so I could have had a less stressful year. Although the circumstances of this year were unique, there are still a lot of tips that I hope can help you both in the classroom or online since we don’t know what the future holds. For both physical and distance learning, I would suggest taking small breaks while working on homework. Note that by “small breaks” I mean like short 5-10 intervals where you just get up, walk around, and clear your mind so you won't start to feel overburdened or extremely stressed, and I don’t mean for you to take breaks every 20 minutes but only when you start to feel really stressed. I didn’t really start trying this until later in the second semester and when online learning started, and I wish I had tried it earlier. Whenever I started to feel really stressed about the amount of work that I still had to do, I would just take a short break by leaving my workspace, walking into another quiet room, and clearing all the thoughts in my head. This helped prevent from getting too stressed and starting to panic about everything I had to get done. It seems so insignificant and that it won't help much, but by clearing your head and letting your mind and body relax, it will help you focus later on when you return to your work.

One thing that I would suggest for all rising juniors to do is to enjoy their year; again, I know this seems like a huge cliche, but when you have half of your junior year taken away, enjoying every moment you have with your friends both in and out of school is SUPER important. Go to the dances, go to the class activities, participate in spirit days. This is your guys’ second to last year of high school, and spending all of it worrying about the future will just make you miss out on everything going on right in front of your eyes. I regret not doing everything I could before school got cancelled, so hopefully you guys won’t do the same. With that being said, do not spend ALL of your time socializing as this is still a very important year; I would say the key point to this year is balancing your social interactions and academic life as both are important to your well being. Knowing when you need to study and when it’s okay to hang out with friends is really important to keeping that balance. For classes, I would suggest audio recording the lectures of teachers that tend to speak really fast and don’t give you enough time to write everything down and just listen to what they are saying instead of worrying about writing down every last detail. That way, you can go back to that audio recording later and take more detailed notes with a better understanding of what was going on. I did this a lot for APUSH and Art History, and it really helped me understand the context of the material and other small details that I would have missed if I had just tried to write down everything they teachers said without trying to comprehend it. If you guys are in sports, I would suggest taking advantage of the time you have during 7th period in your off season to try and get as much homework done as you can so you can sleep earlier (sleep is VITAL to surviving junior year- like without sleeping a lot, it’s going to be a huge struggle). Hopefully, you’ll find these tips helpful for this next year, and if you have any other questions about certain classes or anything else, don’t hesitate and come talk to me!!!

to c/o 2022