As an eighth grader, I was told to enjoy my time in middle school because high school would be much worse. Then, as a freshman, I was told to savor the stress-free periods of high school because it would only get harder from there. When I was a sophomore, people told me that I was fortunate not to be suffering through the rigor of junior year, and as a junior, the seniors told me the worst was yet to come because application season is when it really gets tough. Every year of high school, I was told to enjoy where I was because my life would only get worse with each passing year. Now that I am more than halfway through my senior year, I finally feel I have enough experience to pick which year was actually the hardest to get through.
​
A common opinion you will hear is that junior year is the most stressful and difficult for students. This is because students take the hardest classes that year, and it is when your grades matter most on your college application. I took four AP classes my junior year, compared to only two between my freshman and sophomore years combined, in addition to an entire schedule of honors courses. Like most students at this school, I put myself through as much rigor as I could in junior year, in hopes of impressing my dream schools, and aside from grades, homework and everything else that comes with taking an entire schedule of honors classes, there was even more that consumed my mind that year. Researching which schools I was going to apply to, asking teachers to write recommendations, supplying the required materials and playing club and school soccer only added to the strain.
​
However, despite all of these factors, junior year still failed to give me the most trouble. That title had and always will belong to freshman year, because unlike freshman year, at least during junior year, I had the experience and mechanisms in place that allowed me to juggle different commitments all at once. Although on paper, the biggest jump in class weight came between sophomore and junior year, the difference between middle school and high school classes was truly night and day. I was used to getting straight As despite sleeping in my classes, as I had in middle school, but I came to a rude awakening when I began my freshman year with the same mentality. It was this lapse of judgment that led me to get a C in Honors Algebra 2 the first quarter of freshman year. It wasn’t until late that year that I started taking classes seriously and figuring out which study methods worked for me, eventually raising my grades — something I had never needed to do before. Additionally, it didn’t help that I was in classes with peers I had never met, teachers whom I didn’t feel comfortable going to for help and a school layout that facilitated getting lost on the way to biology every day.
​
I know that everybody’s high school experience is different, and other people may not share my struggle timeline. I could understand arguments for any of the four years of high school being the hardest to get through. Truthfully, my biggest takeaway is not that I should have prepared more for high school or that I should have realized what a challenge freshman year would be, but that I shouldn’t have accepted the mentality that things could only get worse, because it forced me to live in constant fear of the future, instead of focusing on where I was in the moment.