“Junior year is so hard”. “Junior year is even harder than senior year”. “You’ll barely make it out of junior year alive”. Those are just a few things people told me the summer of entering my junior year. And I can verify that all those statements are true. Junior year is tough no matter if you’re taking all CPs classes or 5 APs. The workload is excessive, and what’s worse is that sophomore year doesn’t prepare you at all for junior year. The jump from 2nd year to 3rd year is so big that you can easily fall in the ditch if you aren’t careful.

 

As juniors, this is the most important year. These are the grades colleges look at so they have to amazing. If our GPA is lacking from the first two years, we have to raise it, and if we did good freshmen and sophomore year we have to maintain it. But grades aren’t the only things we have to think about. Some of us have after school extracurriculars like clubs, sport, work, or volunteering. Each one of our activities demands us to be perfect, but we can only keep up the perfect facade for so long.

 

I always complain about how stressed I am to my friends and family. But are we as teenagers, especially high school juniors, more stressed than adults? I sat down with a couple of people to hear what they have to say. My friend, Sinead Qiu, believed that high school students are more stressed. “I don’t get sleep. I’m too busy doing school work. I do think we are more stressed than adults with 40 hours a week jobs. We have to worry about homework, tests, quizzes, getting and maintains good grades, sports, clubs, volunteer requirements, work, SATs, ACTs, and now we are starting to have to worry about college apps.

 

I know adults have to worry about bills and taking care of kids but at the age we are we aren’t supposed to have as much stress as do.” It’s true, the stress why go through does take physical and emotional tolls on us. I, and many CHS juniors can confirm we’ve had a number of mental breakdowns from the start of junior year till now, and we aren’t even halfway through the school year.

 

I sat down with my mom and asked her what she thought about it. “That’s crazy, there’s so many things you guys don’t have to worry about that we do as adult.” After I explained Sinead’s argument to my mother, she changed her stance: “You know what, you’re right. I didn’t think about it that way. You guys are going through things we aren’t. And everything is coming all at once.”

 

The more I thought about what Sinead said the more I agreed with her. Adults have an eight hour work day, and for most when they go home their work is done. For us we have an eight hour school day, then we go home to do more school work. Some night I have at least five hours of homework; some nights I don’t even get two full hours of sleep. All these contribute to the stress that teenagers feel. The worst part is that it's just going to keep getting worse. We are working ourselves to death, and destroying our mental health while we are at it. So yes, I do think we are more stressed than adults. Especially since we are too young to be stressing the way we are. A wise friends of mine once said,“there’s an unhealthy level of stress, and we’ve crossed that line a long time ago”.