Sophomore struggles: Sophomores are the new juniors

    This fall has taught us a lesson: There’s no room for watching “Grey’s Anatomy” at 1 a.m. or stalking Selena Gomez on Instagram into the late hours of the night anymore.

While we slowly adjust to the changes in sophomore year, our nights now consist of homework and frequent Snapchats with captions complaining about the enormous amount of English homework thrown at us every class.

    Unfortunately, when choosing our classes last year, we decided to take high-intensity classes such as Chemistry Honors.

This, of course, was our downfall. We’ve slogged through September and October while playing sports two hours a day —  Esha plays squash while Phoebe plays water polo — and we are now struggling to maintain decent GPAs. Even regular classes, such as English 10, feel like honors-level courses because of the amount of reading and writing. To say that it’s been hard easing into our hectic schedules is an understatement.

Instead of spending hours devouring all the snacks in our pantry while watching Netflix in bed, our weekends now consist of Starbucks meetings for World History group projects and constant FaceTimes to find out if we had to turn in our “Lord of the Flies” essays via Canvas or turnitin.com. Because sports tournaments and games frequently take up our weekends, we are left with dedicating Sunday nights from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. to  homework and studying. Let’s just say it takes several cups of vanilla lattes to get through the night.

    And just as we were somewhat adjusting to our more stressful lives, October hit us. With only one break in the entire month, it felt as if teachers were assigning even more homework and tests than usual.

We are robbed not only of precious vacation time, but also of Halloween — the only holiday where we’re able to disguise ourselves from being sophomores. Instead of going to a haunted house or hanging out with friends, our Halloween night consisted of us doing homework, studying for the upcoming trigonometry test, and handing out Sour Patch Kids packets to three trick-o-treaters, as our neighborhoods have virtually no kids.

    Additionally, we now have to worry about college preparation. In freshman year, the SATs seemed a million years away and we didn’t have to worry about college.

Now, in addition to homework, we have to study for the PSAT and the SAT, since we realize everyone is either taking the the tests this year or early next year. We would usually study for these standardized tests on a long weekend or week-long break, but since October had none of those, we were left studying for twice as long on weekdays.    

With us taking Chemistry Honors, trying to stay on top of newspaper deadlines and preparing for the SAT, sophomore year seems a lot like what we envisioned junior year to be like.

    We’ve survived (at least, we hope we have) the month of October, along with our first standardized test (the PSAT) and our first peek at what junior and senior year will look like.

After pushing through what has been one of the toughest months yet, we’re glad October is in the past. All we can say now is that Thanksgiving break, we’ve never been more excited to see you coming.