Every high school student cannot wait to become a senior. Seniors are at the top of the heap: they sit front row at football games, get out of school weeks before everyone else, get off campus, and more. Indeed there are many perks to being a senior, but being about one fourth into the school year, senior year has proven to be different than I expected it to be.

Don’t listen to what anybody tells you in saying that junior year is the hardest year. Senior year is equally–if not more–difficult than junior year. Yes, seniors have more room in their schedule for elective classes, but if you have been taking honors classes the majority of your high school career, then odds are you will be senior year too. Those classes are hard; being a senior does not automatically make everything a breeze.

“As senior year started to get going, I hit a wall,” said senior Jenna Dvorak. “It was almost like a wake up call; I was not expecting it to be this hard.”

On top of having a challenging academic course load, you have to apply to college! That is an entirely different stress load in itself. Applying to college gives seniors constant pressure of whether or not they are good enough for their desired schools. It’s a lot, because seniors have their entire futures riding on these applications. Applying to college means writing essays that you will spend hours to weeks reworking. Writing these essays with absurd prompts creates a whole different level of “lots of homework”, especially when you are taking four AP classes and have homework in each of them almost every night.

“I thought that senior year would be half the workload of junior year, but it’s not,” said senior Savanna Clemments. “I thought that I would have a lot more time to work on college stuff and focus on the things I want to focus on. Senior year is this mountain of things you have to do–you have your classes, your homework, your activities, work, and college essays.”

Maybe for the seniors, there is an end in sight: the glorious second semester. By second semester, seniors have already applied to college, and some might even know where they are going by late February. For seniors, second semester holds prom (which brings senior ditch day), and graduation too. Maybe we seniors just have to grit our teeth until second semester. That is the hope. But by taking year long AP classes, how could it be different than first semester?

“Senior year really sucks right now,” said Grace Que, senior. “I am not gonna deny that, but I think that second semester is going to be a lot of fun. I love our class–the class of 2017. Second semester is gonna be our last time to do all that high school has to offer. I think maybe then I’ll finally feel like a senior.”

Some overall advice for any underclassman from all of us loving seniors would be that you should write your essays as early as possible. In a lot of English classes, they give you that chance to write a college essay–choose your prompt wisely. If you want your senior year to be easy, you can certainly make it that way, and it goes the same way if you like to challenge yourself. Make sure you take into account that you are going to be applying to colleges, so you need to have a well balanced course load. Senior year is fun, but it is not easy.