Okay yeah, junior year is kind of the gigantic ball of stress and pre-senioritis that everyone said it was going to be. At the beginning of the year I thought ‘Oh, it can’t be THAT bad, can it?’. Newsflash. It is. If you’re very academically-dedicated like me, you’ll probably be taking higher-level courses like AP to help prepare you for college. I’m in five of these classes, because I took two my sophomore year and decided three more wouldn’t kill me. And they haven’t. They’ve killed me numerous times, not just once. This week alone I’ve had four tests, two quizzes, a 4-5 page research paper and an enormous amount of homework every single night on top of studying, actually doing my research paper and getting the next newspaper ready for your viewing pleasure (P.S: shout-out to the rest of the newspaper staff for keeping me somewhat sane during this week). Also, I’m looking forward to tomorrow whenever I have two tests in my first two classes- both of which are AP. Great. Guess I’ll see how that goes with three hours of sleep. Oh my gosh, I haven’t even talked about the minuscule amount of sleep most of us juniors get. This year is the meat of our college applications- for some, the year that gets them into that dream college or not. No pressure on us of course. But, we all know that every grade less than an A will make a difference in how high our class rank is- and it doesn’t matter that your friend is in K physics and getting a 100 and you’re in AP physics and getting an 88- you’ll still be lower than them. Isn’t that great? All the extra work and you might move down in your class rank? So, back to my sleep topic, all of this means that to keep your grades up you have to study, study, study. Let’s think about a typical night in a junior’s life. So, you get done with school around 2:30. Most juniors are involved in some sort of organization/sport/club, so let’s estimate you actually get home around 4 because you’re involved in Band and had practice. Then, you get home and it’s time to get to work. You grab a snack first, because to actually do well on your work you need some brain food, and by then it’s 4:15. You finally sit down and get started. Let’s say you’re in three AP classes- AP English III, AP U.S. History, and A.P. Physics, and you also have Pre-Calculus K- and that’s it for your core classes. You know you have some reading notes to get through for APUSH (AP U.S. History) in order to not have to do 70 pages the night before the reading quiz, so you start on that and finish a good chunk about an hour later. By that time, it’s 5:15 and you have to eat dinner with your family and help clean up afterwards. So now it’s 6:15. You finally get back to work and begin to study for the test you have tomorrow also in APUSH. Now it’s 6:45, and you get started on AP Physics. Let’s say you have a test tomorrow for that class too, because hey, tests on the same day do happen- and quite often. So you finally get done studying for Physics and it’s 7:45, and let’s also say you have your packet that you have partially-done during the upcoming weeks to study for this class due tomorrow too. So now it’s 8:30. You finally get to your AP English homework and start on the analysis questions that are due tomorrow over a passage about how squirrels have impacted American Literature. I’ve had something as crazy as this I promise you.  These questions are really multiple questions in one, so it takes you until 9:45 to really finish with them. Then it’s time to study for the vocabulary quiz you have tomorrow in AP English. Vocab isn’t too bad, so you finish around 10:15 with that. Then, it’s time to do your Pre-Calculus homework. Let’s say you let Pre-Cal slip this time so now you have to do all five of the worksheets tonight- because trust me, you can be the most organized person in the world, but sometimes you just get too tired so you procrastinate. By the time you finish with those it’s 11:30, because you had to take a break and watch a little Netflix so your brain wouldn’t break down and die on you. Now, you finally go shower and get ready for bed and you finally fall asleep around 15 after midnight. Then, you wake up at 5 AM because you have to be ready to leave by 6:15 because you have a club meeting at 6:30 and also do your morning chores around the house. So, with all of that, you would get four hours and 45 minutes of sleep. Junior year sounds amazing, right?