Ten hours of homework? Check. Two hours of sleep? Check. Seven club meetings to attend…in one day? Check. SAT, ACT, and AP tests to study for? Check, check, check. A Life…?

Congratulations! By the looks of it, you have met all the necessary requirements to enter into the best year of high school, junior year. However, you may be thinking “I don’t think I can handle this.” But you can! It’s really quite simple. To make this most important year of high school successful, you just need to follow the life of the average American high school junior.

First, like all other high school-aged children, you must make sure that you start the lengthy day ahead of you by waking up before the sun rises. However, because you are a junior, and you will collect twenty pounds of homework from your teachers by the end of every school day, you cannot rise with the chickens in your soft, plush bed. To follow the laziness that you will develop after the first few weeks of school, you should forget about climbing the mountainous stairs to bed. As an alternative, it will become a requirement that you must wake up in a daze in the same location where you started your homework the day before, on a makeshift bed of paper worksheets, peppered with pencils for maximum comfort. Yet, unlike your fourth grade brother or sister, who rises with the dew in fuzzy footy pajamas, you must wear the sane attire to sleep that you wore to school the day before, resulting in a morning mammoth sized stress-out while rushing to get showered and dressed for the school day.

After you force your mother to drive like an Indy 500 NASCAR driver to school because you missed the bus, you should insist on arriving in style (aka, your mother’s minivan sliding right up to the front entrance of the building with a screech from the tires because she was driving so fast). However, you will not be able to run into first period like in your previous years of schooling because your bulging-at-the-seams backpack adds so much extra weight to your body that it will slow you down. As you speedily walk down the hallway, some people may possibly mistake you for the Hunch Back of Note Dame, but never mind them. You ought to have only one thought on your mind: to get through the people-filled halls without hitting someone with your oversized backpack.

Now you are probably thinking, “This is the life I want to have! I cannot wait to have sleepovers with my homework every night and look like a hunched over man!” But hold your horses. There is a great deal more that you must learn in order to make your junior year fantastic. You still have the rest of an exciting junior year school day to go through!

As you go through your classes, half asleep I might add (which is the best possible way to comprehend new information), it is essential that you do other homework that was not completed the night before because you have caught a disease known as procrastination. What is procrastination you may ask? Well silly, it allows for more effort to be put into your schoolwork! For example, your chemistry teacher gave you a packet of mole to mass stoichiometry equations to complete for homework. However, because you had twenty interesting pages of AP U.S. history reading and a philosophical English essay to write last night, you could not complete your chemistry packet (even though it was two pages long). The net day in pre-calc, which is right before your chemistry class, you scurry to discretely complete the packet so your math teacher will not notice that you are not copying the notes from the board (which you might acquire later from the brainy sophomore that sits next to you). This, junior in the making, is new and improved procrastination. After petit homework episodes like the example above, you must go through the rest of your day worried about finishing your homework that night (along with going to lacrosse practice and an SGA meeting). Oh, and do not forget, you constantly have to stress about your grades, because, after all, this is junior year, and college is around the corner!

Now remember, your grades are the determining factor of your future: what career path you chose, who you end up in a relationship with, where you end up living for the rest of your life, and what you can afford to eat on a daily basis all stem from what college you get accepted into. And the college that you will spend four years at is determined by your stats from junior year. Now, this may sound a little heavy-handed and you may be thinking “I need to work extremely hard”, but as I have said before, junior year is as easy as pie.

To obtain straight A’s so that you can get into all the Ivy League universities (and the seven other categories of Ivies in the college circuit), you should check your grades constantly on Home Access. You must now dig up the username and password given to you three years ago and start checking those grades morning, noon, and night. If there is a discrepancy with a grade, you must contact your teacher right away so that he or she knows how much you are about your scores. Moreover, as the end of the marking period rolls around and you have a 89.444 percent in a course, you are required to beg your teacher for one more point so that you can get an A for the marking period. Remember, these grades mean everything to you. They define who you are and how much of a success you will be in the future, just as the label on your jeans characterizes who you are as a person.

After you have cheerfully stressed about your grades and extracurricular activities, it is time for you to arrive home from a joyful day at school, prepare for the night of work ahead of you, and look forward to the endless cycle of the rest of the school year.*

You are now saying to yourself, “I CAN DO THIS! It’s going to be the best year EVER!”

And it will be, don’t worry.

*Note: this is the typical life of a high school junior. If you have just finished reading this and either passes out, had a heart attack, became extremely nauseous, or developed any gray hair, please fail sophomore year so you have extra time to prepare.