Junior year – the hardest time of a high school student’s life – erupted for me with challenges, time constraints, failures, and procrastination. Besides the pain of receiving a “B” on my report card, being absent for the first time in high school, and understanding the panic that accompanies the choice of sleep over homework, I have learned a lot from junior year.

Sometimes you have to try to succeed

            Take it from someone who hates studying: life is much less stressful if you study. It’s not fun. Do it anyway. It’s even less fun to fail a test.

Sometimes hard work pays off

            The best feeling in the world – besides eating a freshly-baked cookie – comes with the reward of earned acknowledgement. When a teacher you have never met knows you for being outstanding, when you earn the highest grade in the class, when you are chosen to be recognized with an award, the feeling is not easily forgotten.

Sometimes it doesn’t…

            At least not on the surface. Second quarter of junior year, my quarter grade in AP Lang was an 88%. I had worked harder in that class than I had ever worked for school, yet I received a lower grade. But it makes every “A” I earn a little bit more rewarding and I know that I have learned more and grown more as a result of taking the class.

Push through anyway

            You strengthen yourself by refusing to give up.

The Internet holds many treasures – millenniums worth of treasures

            Try not to drown in them. Whether you get lost in Facebook’s mind-numbing depths or lose track of time watching cat videos, whether you regularly visit iwastesomuchtime.com or ponder the meaning of life on Twitter, whether you prefer to visit reddit or randomly google words, bear in mind: you could be sleeping.

There will be times when you do not actually get to sleep

            Really. Sometimes entire nights will pass and the sun will rise and you realize that you never changed out of your clothes. You never, in fact, left your chair. Hopefully you weren’t procrastinating on the internet…

And there will be times when you choose sanity over scholastic excellence

            At 2:00 in the morning, that Bio lab fails to seem so important when you imagine the warm comfort of bed. Sometimes bed will win.

Because there is no such thing as perfection

            The hardest thing for me to learn – but perhaps the best lesson – sometimes you cannot do it all. You are not a failure because you made a choice, just make the best choices you can and go from there.