By Gio Arteaga
The First day of Freshman year in high school is unmatched. A breath of fresh air in a new set of eyes. New teachers and new friends were what everyone wanted—the dream of partying until 10 pm with the solo red cups filled with fruit punch—the high school dream. The realization that these next four years determine your future is something that lingers in many heads collectively. There is immense pressure placed on you to do well in high school, because all 4 years are incredibly important to succeed. The transition from middle school to high school needs acclimation; freshman year is all about navigating, networking, and paying attention to your surroundings to gather the rights and wrongs. This year is the time for having fun and placing the foundation down to stack up.
However, this fun was short-lived once sophomore year arrived. There is still this pressure that is placed on you to do well— if you are lucky you can place this discipline on yourself. You put this weight on yourself during freshman year, it still lingers, and in turn, this causes you to still place these same unrealistic expectations on yourself that internally crushes you. Realistically speaking, freshman year is the easiest year with the least amount of stress and workload. At least this was my case. Looking back now, freshman year was such a simple time that seemed like the end of the world, when it was just the beginning.
This year for much of my grade as well as myself has caused what many know as “the sophomore slump.” This is the time during sophomore year when you still feel like you need to push yourself to do well, but in the process, you burn yourself out because of the never-ending pressure. For myself, I know at the start of this semester I completed all my work the day it came out and stayed on top of everything. I turned assignments in early, took detailed notes, and tried my best to continually stay on top. I would stay up all night just to finish things and get them done to make the best impression regardless of the difficulty. All I can say to this is yes, this is an amazing habit to form for yourself early on in life, but please don’t do what I did. After a short while, all these late nights working on assignments and projects, and trying to make these impressions to my teachers, I severely burned myself out to the point where everything even outside of school felt like a challenge. Doing my chores felt like climbing mountains, and cleaning my room felt like endless rivers; and then on top of everything else, coming home and doing homework was just the cherry on top. These habits that formed early on led to long-term procrastination that sticks with me. For example, right now I have five English assignments, two math assignments, ten chemistry assignments, and even for journalism, there’s a lot that I have to keep up with and it becomes stressful. It’s a scale where more weight is added on top of each other until finally, it cracks under pressure.
I want to emphasize that so many people feel this way about sophomore year as it’s a new setting where the material you learn becomes harder, more rigorous, and even more demanding. The workload, time, and mental energy this year takes is not for the weak and is something that should not be taken lightly. On top of it all, this year many of my peers and I are beginning to take AP classes and are going to go on to take AP exams in May. These classes add even more challenging curves to our schedules and are taxing to study for.
So if you read to this point I have a few points of advice for you to prevent burnout. Please realize that if you were a perfect 4.0 student, it’s normal to get lower grades in your classes. I’m not saying to give up or not to try, but please if you’re struggling don’t punish yourself too much because it’s understandable as classes get harder, and the material becomes more difficult. Secondly, refrain from staying up later than 1 am (unlike me at the moment), because when you get less than 8 hours of sleep, things begin to feel ten times harder and every step feels like you’re being shackled. So please get some sleep. Finally, take time for yourself this year and take breaks. It’s important to study and get things done, but don’t force yourself to sit in your room and annotate the AP Modern World History textbook, because yes it needs to be done, but do it gradually to give yourself a break. Think of yourself before anything else. If you can’t perform, then who else can?