Junior year is not a marathon. It’s a collection of short and stagnated sprints, each one leaving you more breathless and exhausted than the last. Some people enter their junior year of high school dreading the stressful times to come. Others have been “senior-springing” since freshman fall. If you belong to the latter category, I would advise you to stop reading now — it sounds like you’ve already got everything figured out. Otherwise, read on.
I’ve realized that the different obstacles one may encounter in junior year parallel the Nine Circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. For your convenience, I will condense it to five stages.
The college process is what makes junior year so hellish, and this is on the forefront of everyone’s mind. Basic prerequisites for getting into college include qualifying for the Olympics and winning a Pulitzer Prize for theoretical physics, otherwise known as the race to build up a college résumé. You may be a repeat, or perhaps you’ve skipped a grade — no matter who you are, in the end, we’re all still in the same boat.
The first stage is college counseling. In order to guide you through this thrilling/horrific process, each junior is assigned a college counselor. One part of the college counseling job is to read over your essays. While you struggle to recall “a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure, how it affected you, and what you learned from the experience,” your college counselor will remind you that your personal essay should be an accurate depiction of yourself and not of that crazy person who threatened to throw herself in front of a moving vehicle for the sake of the “experience.” Additionally, don’t allow counselors to crush your soul when they describe your dream school as an “extreme reach” — your parents are probably doing enough of that already.
The second stage is college visits. Something your college counselor will inevitably and repeatedly tell you to do is to conduct research on schools. One of the best ways to do that is by visiting the institution firsthand. However, after seeing numerous colleges, you will begin to realize that they all blend together — not only in your mind but on page as well. By the end of the whole ordeal, you may feel the urge to strangle the next admissions officer who tells you about the all-too-familiar tidbit, like the school’s faculty-to-student ratio. Among Choate’s Class of 2019, one student visited nineteen schools in two weeks. I certainly hope that person enjoyed their spring break.
The third stage is standardized testing. Juniors have the choice between taking the SAT or the ACT. Although each test is allegedly different, both are similar in that they set standards by which colleges measure you. In short, all the knowledge you’ve acquired in your many years of schooling — starting with the ABC’s in kindergarten through advanced calculus in high school — is assessed in three tedious hours. As it happens, there are schools that don’t require said test scores. However, don’t get your hopes up; schools that don’t look at your standardized test scores will most inevitably direct their attention to your GPA — incidentally, the fourth stage of junior year hell.
Your junior year GPA is the most important of them all because, guess what, that’s the one reported to colleges! (Please, note that a 4.0 at Choate is not as easily attainable as one at another school because at the Rosemary, we don’t believe in grade inflation.) Some students, apparently to further their junior year struggles, choose to take advanced courses in special programs such as SRP or the EIP at the KEC. These special people are unlike most in that they seemingly enjoy torture. Still, don’t feel bad if you’re not a masochist. After all, there’s no need to quantify or assess yourself by your GPA and testing scores (even if college admissions officers will).
The final stage is the most brutal. Its equivalent in Inferno is the ninth circle in which those who commit treachery are subjected to eternal torture under ice. Well? You’ve guessed it: “crunch week.” This seven-day marathon at the end of the spring term combines all the struggles of junior year into one mythological monster of a week. In addition to cramming for final exams (for those junior year grades that do matter), you have to prepare for the SAT Subject Tests, which will round off the week. And, eventually, when you do manage to drag what’s left of your soul into summer vacation, it won’t be long before you’re hit with the reality of senior fall.
However, unlike the Nine Circles of Hell in Inferno, junior year doesn’t last forever. Eventually, you will get into college and move on from Choate. The truth is, junior year is what you make of it. So keep your head up, smile at your GPA, and, when the time comes, remove Naviance from your list of bookmarked sites. Instead of worrying incessantly, try to stop for a moment and enjoy your high-school experience. Before you know it, it’ll be senior spring, and you’ll be wishing you still had time left to spend with the people who made this school your home.
