One year ago, “A sophomore’s take on midyear stress: It’s not just the juniors” was published. The bottom line this year is that it actually is mostly just the juniors.
Contrary to the minor academic roadblocks, occasional late nights and mental breakdowns of sophomore year, junior year is like a relentless tornado that sucks you up into a year of academic distress that will spit you back out at the end of the school year with a major case of senioritis. Hearing about the “worst year of high school” as a sophomore doesn’t compare to living it. It may seem as though its title is an exaggeration, however, high school takes a steep turn in junior year as soon as syllabi are signed that first week.
To summarize the first half of junior year, it has been filled with Internal Assessments (IAs), Individual Orals (IOs), struggling to find who to tutor for Honor Society points and Mr. Booz’s frightening ManageBac updates (if you know, you know). The level of adaptation that a junior has to have when traversing this school year leaves all pride in conquering sophomore year in the dust. What makes junior year the hardest is exactly that; learning to be okay with lowering your standards for yourself slightly and putting in your all for International Baccalaureate (IB) higher-ups — whoever they are that are always talked about — to give you a “C” on what would’ve been an “A” last year. C’est la vie.
For IB Diploma candidates, two letters they’ll never be able to forget are “I” and “B” and the ones that come after, as their everyday lives are now filled with these acronyms. The difference between standard, honors and IB classes is that IB doesn’t just test you on what you know and reward you with a superb grade half-based on your effort, rather humbles you until you feel like all of your education up until then has failed you. Having a load of IB classes is not completely miserable, but it’s definitely enough to question how you got to the point of typing in all of those course requests into SIS the prior year.
In all reality, junior year has been eye-opening (only by consuming hazardous amounts of caffeine daily). It does teach you ways in which to apply content you’ve learned into real life situations and to think more on the collegiate level. For that, IB gets a pat on the back, but the struggles of junior year outweigh the benefits in this mid-year period. Maybe that’s why the class color for juniors is blue.
On top of trying to maintain a healthy level of sanity throughout this year, SAT and ACT preparation, choosing senior courses and thinking about college in the near future leaves students having to write into the next day’s box on your planner, just to have more space. As for thinking about college, some juniors’ favorite website is a GPA calculator to see if they can get into UVA or not. Oftentimes, the pressure of junior year comes from comparison to others and their personal achievements. When one of your peers can hypothetically get into UVA and you hypothetically can’t, it only depletes your energy, questioning the extent of your academic efforts. But on the other hand, it also motivates you to persevere and compete for that hypothetical letter of acceptance.
As for the social scene, part of it consists of staying after school to work on science fair projects and having one or two friends swoop in to work on their projects, seeing a friend in the hallway on the way to a sports practice or remediating a test and happening to sit by one person you know.
Sophomores, friendly warning to pack your school bags and be prepared to practically live at school your junior year, or at least spend far more hours remediating with a teacher or getting help than being with your own family.
To conclude this “take on mid-year stress,” freshman and sophomores, your increasingly hectic schedules and overwhelm in the middle of the school year is recognized; however, insinuating that sophomore year equates to the same amount of stress as junior year is false. Seniors, your efforts are also seen and looked up to; you give the class of 2026 a breath of hope for the year’s conclusion and of longing for all those seniority benefits. Until next year’s mid-year take, from a junior to other juniors, congratulations on half-surviving this school year so far.