What No One Tells You About Junior Year

I am still trying to figure out what makes Junior year so different from the others. In college there isn’t necessarily a certain path you have to follow for every major. You have prerequisites, sure, but there are many classes that you can take whenever it fits into your schedule. Yet here I am. My motivation likes to play hide and seek. My schedule has reached maximum capacity. And the only thing that has kept my sanity intact is secretly listening to Michael Buble’s Christmas album, pretending that the holiday season is closer than it is.

Junior year seems much harder than the rest. And everyone I have talked to feels the same. My first semester in college I took the same number of credits as I am now, and I remember thinking it wasn’t much different than high school. Did I jinx it? Or maybe it’s that I am a little bit over-involved. High ambitions mean high time commitments. It could also be explained by having to take some higher-level courses once you get further into your major, but that doesn’t mean all of your classes have to be upper-level courses. So what gives? What makes so Junior year so rough?

Junior year will make you do some strange things:

You will snooze whenever you get the opportunity. 

No matter how much sleep you get it will never be enough.

You will never have enough time. 

Remember those papers you procrastinated on or the tests you crammed for when you stayed up all night at College Library freshman and sophomore year? Even if you stay on top of everything, you will feel like you should be doing this all the time. But you eventually go to bed, because you are so sleep-deprived already, and you have lost motivation from how much time you have already spent in the library.

You will envy your senior friends who are much closer to graduation. 

You will simultaneously be glad that you get to stay in school, and don’t have to worry about trying to beg people to hire you find a full-time job.

You will hear horror stories of “senioritis” and wonder how much worse it can get. 

And your senior friends will assure you senior year your motivation is much lower. 

You may go hours without an sort of human interaction. 

Library is life. You aren’t intentionally withdrawing from society, but more often times than not studying isn’t really a social activity. And you have A LOT of studying to do.

You will have classes that make you question your intelligence, because no matter how much time you spend studying them it still feels like the textbook might as well have been written in hieroglyphics.

I once learned in psych that getting enough sleep before a test can be just as important as studying, so I should just quit now, right? 

Junior year: the time in your life when you are in a constant state of having so much to do that you just want to take a nap. This year will wear you a down a bit. Maybe your prime nap spot isn’t the library, but you can probably relate to people above at least a little bit. Junior year is exhausting! It may be hard to believe now, but winter break is closer than it seems. It will be the perfect time to recharge before the spring semester. 

• college
• junior year
• library