Assignment 24 - Grace Payne

Junior year. Where to begin? I'm sure most of us juniors would agree that this has been our hardest year yet. This is the first year I've genuinely had to worry about not having enough time to study for everything and do everything that I've always wanted to do. Quite frankly, this year has just been hard. More things to do, less time to do it, and on top of that the subject matter is flat out more difficult. But in all honesty, I'm doing pretty okay. The teachers I've had this year have been some of the best I've ever had, and I genuinely believe that I'm learning a lot.

I feel lucky to say that I've had more successes than failures this year. My biggest concern was time management, and I'm actually doing very well. Only a couple times this year have I felt like it was just all too much, and in the end I recovered from those moments well. I've gotten consistently high grades in high school, so it kind of came as a shock to me to see those grades slip a little during my junior year. However, it taught me an important lesson. A's are A's, no matter if it's a 92 or 100 (After rereading that line, the problem of which number A I have seems super trivial, but it was something I had to get used to.) It also taught me that perfect grades are unrealistic, and as long as I continue to put it effort everything is going to turn out okay.

I'm super excited to say that in the summer I'll be doing the Governor's Scholar Program. Before that, however, I plan on getting a few weeks in with my summer swim team that I've been with since I was 4. After GSP, my summer is a bit ambiguous. We may go on vacation, we may wait. We may do some college visits, maybe not. Regardless, I'll be doing something to further my college application process. Towards the beginning of the school year I'll try to attend the freshman orientations, because I think they're fun.

For my senior year, I want to make sure I'm enjoying high school. Freshman through junior years have been focusing on studying and my grades to get into college, but senior year is my year to relax a little bit, and just live. After college applications are done, of course. I want to be able to balance senioritis with my strive for perfection. In all honesty, I have no idea how I plan to approach either of those goals. I'm not a particularly social person, so forcing myself to get out and do things will be difficult. When it comes to senioritis, I have no idea how to avoid that. These are things I'll probably figure out as I go along.