Another day of staying up late finishing your school work. It seems like you can never get to a stopping point. You just have assignment after assignment and they are all piling up each week. It’s almost as if you were drowning in school work. You took harder classes this year in hopes to bring your GPA up but it is coming at a cost. You feel all this pressure to get everything done so you can get into a good college and make your parents proud. This is a familiar story for many current high school students. 

     “I feel like that is normal for everyone to feel some sort of academic pressure; there will be some times, maybe once or twice a month, when it feels like due dates are piling up on each other,” junior Hayden Humphreys said. “It starts to feel that you are in over your head.” 

     Along with academic pressure, it is typical for high school students to have extracurricular activities. Whether they participate in sports or clubs, play an instrument or work a job. No matter what they choose to participate in, extracurriculars cause students to be faced with further responsibilities.      With these added responsibilities, students have to mount the challenge of reaching a balance between them and school. 

     “I play a bunch of sports for school, swim, beach volleyball, golf and track and I am also in a lot of school clubs, involved in my church choir and youth group,” sophomore Kinsley Tate White said. “I am taking things one thing at a time at this point so I don’t become too overwhelmed by everything that I have on my plate at once, which happens often.”

     While some students feel extra pressure from extracurricular activities, there are also students who feel as though that there was a jump in the level of academics compared to previous grades. Freshman Lenora Jantzen, like many of her peers, feels as though that level increased dramatically for her. 

     “In general, my academic pressure is hard to keep up with because I feel like there was a stretch in my life when I didn’t do a ton of learning, especially during that elementary period when you keep repeating stuff and now all of the sudden the level has been increased dramatically so it is hard to keep up sometimes,” Jantzen said. 

A lot of the time older siblings and parents help students with school. Despite there being many benefits of having the help of a family member, there could also be some added pressure to do well. Whether it be from your parents or siblings success, some students may feel they need to live up to