See, sophomore year is pretty underrated, I consider it the middle child of High school. For instance, it’s not as hated as Freshman year, which I consider to be essentially an extended middle school grade. It’s not like Junior year, which is basically when you begin preparations for the real world. It’s also not like Senior year when you must finalize what exactly you want to do at the beginning of your independent life.
However, sophomore year is extremely important considering you begin the transition from having no responsibility to having some responsibility. It’s like the gateway into adulthood. Junior year is just the time when the idea that you must prepare for the real world, kicks into high gear. What I mean is that you can do stuff in the real world that isn’t inherently related to school.
For example when you turn 16, which is mostly the age of people in Sophomore year, then you get to do things like, obtaining a driver’s license or getting a job (in the summertime). However, the school does offer things to help you with these real-world abilities. For example, this school provides Driver education over the winter and summer along with career counseling for job applications.
There’s also something to note, sophomore year is quite important in adding to the rest of high school. That being the ramping up of difficulty in the work. See, a lot of the work becomes harder as you climb up the ladder in grades to more difficult but rewarding classes, I mean that’s pretty obvious, but there is one downside to said classes. That being the workload, not only do you get much more difficult work, but you get it in masse, so you might have to stay up nights just to complete assignments.
Now no teacher is going to be unreasonable and give you an enormous amount of work in an unrealistically small amount of time, but it sure will feel like it. Yet this prepares you, not only for the higher grade levels but also for college work, which is notoriously difficult. This difficult workload, I’d say, begins in sophomore year, when it shoots up from the light workload of Freshman year, one I’d compare to middle school work.
The final thing is clubs, in sophomore year, you become involved in more clubs as you find out what you want to spend your years in high school on. For example, I didn’t start with journalism, in my Freshman year, I had medical skills. However, I realized I didn’t want to do medical skills, so, during sophomore year, I changed my class to Journal because I thought it would be much more interesting and my judgment was correct.
Now at the end of my sophomore year, I have once again switched interests, this for the final time, as I try to balance my work and regular life to not have school become my entire focus even when I’m not at school. This has also allowed me to do much more than work, like socials, which admittedly, I usually can’t afford, but when I’m not paying, I’ll happily go. Something I never did during Freshman year, as I only focused on working.
In conclusion, I believe the sophomore year is extremely underrated and is quite literally the year where you’ll figure out just what you want to do in high school. Whether that be at the beginning of the year or at the end, is really up to the person.
