“Being a senior in high school, I have learned that stress is part of the package. There have been many times this year that I have felt like giving up and throwing in the towel, but I hung in there and learned I need to count on myself to get through. If anyone tells you that it’s easy, it’s not. With hard classes and college applications, this has been the toughest year of all. It’s almost over, but trust me, it wasn’t easy.
I have an AP class from hell
For starters, I have three AP classes, all of which expect to be a priority over the others. My English Literature teacher, for example, gives way too much work for the class to possibly handle. In a class of 15 students, all of whom are intelligent, more than half the class was in danger of failing. She keeps telling us that we need to do the work but gives out so much that it’s impossible to keep track of it all. She’ll assign 11 essays, each two pages long. She expects us to spend 40 minutes on each one, and they’re all due at the end of the week. Suddenly the next day, she assigns four poem analyses due also at the end of the week. It’s the only class in which I cannot put my complete self to work. Not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t.
Because of this one class, I spent many long nights just trying to do the work. I’d come home at two or three in the afternoon and work straight through the rest of day until two or three in the morning of the next day. Sometimes my friend and I would get together and work all night. We needed to wake each other up if we fell asleep. All this, just from one class!
I was so tired sometimes, I fell asleep in class. For a while, I had trouble remembering things like the spelling of words. At times, I also muttered words and made no sense. On most nights, I only managed to get five hours sleep. Both my friend and I dealt with the same B.S. from this class. Everyone in the class wants to tell the teacher off and quit the course but no one does. You see, quitting an AP class does not look good to colleges. So for the most part, we have to take whatever the teacher throws at us and deal with it.
Applying to college worried me
Another stress is that of college and future plans. I’m the first in my family to go through the process of applying to college. I worried that I would not be able to attend just because I’m not exactly 4.0 or higher material. I did everything I had to do to apply to colleges and finally got all that out of the way. Then it was the waiting, watching as friends got their acceptances and wondering if I would be rejected. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t envious of my friends or anything like that. I was happy for them but worried that I wasn’t going to be accepted by anyone. Fortunately, things did turn out all right. I was accepted to my first choice college, USC, and got into others which I thought would not accept me.
I try to get away from my stress
For me, the best way to overcome stress is just to find a way to temporarily get away from it all. This can be achieved through both physical activities as well as mental. All it takes is just some time. Sometimes my friend and I will go out and just hang out in a park or at the beach just talking and relaxing, far away from all the school stress. I often take a bus without any idea where it’s headed and just ride it till I decide to get off. This is my way of having a little adventure and getting away from everything. So far I’ve managed to get as far as Long Beach, Malibu and everything in between. By far the best thing I have done to relieve stress was going up into Angeles National Forest and staying in a cabin for a church retreat. Up there it seems like time stands still and stress is nonexistent. The best thing to do is just to get away and relax a little. After all, you have to understand that stress does pass and life goes on. “