I am not going to lie to you about junior year, that’s not what I’m here for, it is one of the most stressful years that you will have in high school.  It starts and ends with tests, decisions, and more tests.

First of all your high school will most likely offer the SATs and CTs in the fall, you may not be ready to take them, but take them anyway. The more you take them the more and better chances you have of getting better scores, the better scores you get the easier it is to get into colleges.  This is super serious business guys, like I’m not kidding when I say take these tests seriously because they determine scholarships, acceptances, and basically anything that involves college. Trust me when I say, I wish I would’ve taken them again just to get 30 points higher so I would’ve been able to go to a better school.

Secondly, start researching colleges and universities you may want to attend that way you have an idea of what kind of scores you need and what exactly you have to do to get there.  You also need to find out what you like and don’t like in a school, you don’t want to end up somewhere you don’t like for four years, it’s not fun. Look at a lot of schools, various sizes, state versus private, community college versus four year, so on and so forth. Do a lot of research and visit as many places as you possibly can, you want to narrow down options as soon as you can so that the application process is easy and painless.

Next, if you want an easy senior year, this is the time to start thinking about it. You want to double up on at least one class if you want to cut out one of your core classes senior year. This is actually something I highly suggest you do because if you are anything like a normal teenager you are going to catch senioritis and if you don’t catch it junior year like me, it will be there by January of your senior year and you don’t want to be stuck taking a bunch of classes you need to graduate that have a lot of work that you won’t want to do.

Finally, if you don’t plan on going to college or university right away, whether you take a gap year or just never go, still take this year to look into options of what to do when you’re done.  You can look into anything from places to work to missionary trips to trade schools. All of those are fantastic things to do and college isn’t really for everyone, some people just fall into their place without a higher education and get places in life. Never think that because you don’t go to college you aren’t going to amount to anything because there are plenty of things that don’t require college degrees, look at other options if you don’t think college is for you.

XOXO

Mary

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January 20: King played a key role in the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that year.

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