Somewhere within the fear of the first day of high school and the excitement of graduation, junior year gets lost. Sure there are some highlights such as finally being an upperclassmen and finally getting the chance to have the time of your life at prom. However, the real reason why junior year is so important is because of how it plays a vital role in kickstarting the future of students in college and beyond. Unfortunately, no one acknowledges this nowadays which only contributes to the loss of importance that junior year suffers. At this point, we might as well call the eleventh grade the middle child of high school.
In terms of hierarchical importance, junior year is ranked at the top. It is the year where you stop saying, “I like math and science,” and start saying, “I am interested in pursuing a career as an accountant or biochemist.” The focus of this year is on narrowing down career paths and figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life. Many people would give credit to senior year for these types of decisions. Those people are sadly mislead. Before you can go to college, or even apply to college for that matter, you have to prepare by going through the dreaded college search. Junior year is the crunch time for doing exactly that. Students are doing the housekeeping and getting all the little things out of the way in preparation for the chaos senior year brings.
Students often forget that junior year is critical from an academic standpoint. See at home, the middle child is often forgotten about amongst the chaos each day brings. Junior year, much like the middle child, is not acknowledged and gets stuck within the messy process of applying for college. By the time senior year rolls around forget it. Seniors are fixed on the year ahead of them and never look back on how they got there. The classes students sign up for and the grades they receive in them during junior year are essential because of how they are the last full set of grades on record that admissions people will see before deciding their fate. This is the last opportunity juniors have to not only do well, but to fill their schedules with honors and advanced placement level classes for the admissions board to see. With college right around the corner, the relationships students make with their teachers is just as important as their grades. Letters of recommendation are a huge part of the college application process, so juniors need to find the time to get to know some of their teachers on a more personal level.
Teachers, however, are not the only thing that impact students during their junior year. Two acronyms . SAT’s and ACT’s. Junior year is full of standardized tests from start to end. With the PSAT in the fall, students can qualify to be a part of a group of merit scholarships and have the opportunity to start requesting information from colleges. Throughout the year, juniors will sign themselves up for SAT prep courses in order to achieve the highest score possible on their exams in May, as more than 90 percent of the colleges and universities in the U.S. recognize the scores received on both the SAT and ACT. If these tests alone do not point out how junior year is a domino effect of everything that follows it, I do not know what does.
The middle child typically gets a bad rap with the older and younger siblings overpowering the middle child’s identity. The same goes for junior year. Freshmen year and senior year completely take junior year’s spotlight away defining it with an understatement of its true value. Freshmen year is great and all, but face it you are at the bottom of the totem pole. Senior year is great too, but it is depressing as you realize how much time has flown by and how you are about to enter the real world. Junior year brings so much to the table and there is a lot more to it aside from the academics.
With the tests and the grades comes the sports and after school activities. Junior year is the perfect time for students to continue to build their resumes. Colleges want to see that students are being involved both in and out of the school community. Without it, students might not get accepted into their top colleges and might even give off the wrong impression to the admissions board. What are you waiting for? Go join Peer Leadership or tryout for varsity soccer or whatever it is for which you have a passion. It is important that juniors not only participate in some clubs after school, but take more of a leadership role in those activities to put the icing on the cake for their college portfolio. No one wants to eat a cake without icing.
There are an endless amount of reasons as to why junior year is so important, and these are just a few of them. See, the more juniors take the time now to accomplish everything they need to for college, the more they can relax and enjoy their very last year of high school. This year is the home stretch, with senior year being the finish line. With that said, junior year is much more important than students realize. Call it the Jan Brady Syndrome if you want- junior year has inevitably become the middle child, robbing it from the credit it deserves.
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