Sophomore year in high school should be known as the forgotten year. You aren’t freshmen so people actually need a reason to hate you, but you still are not upperclassmen yet so no one really cares about you, it’s the neglected year. For me, the end of my sophomore year is coming quickly and the realization is starting to hit hard that I’m 50 percent done with high school. That means that the next two years entail piles of IB work, a lot of crying, praying, and a new found familiarity with the walls of my room.

With junior year comes the promise of ACT prep, IB, and college scouting; some students in my grade have already gotten started on these wondrous adventures, jumping in head first. But for those of us who have an addiction to Netflix and tend to procrastinate haven’t even acknowledged the existence of words like “IB”. It’s no wonder we choose to ignore our impending futures because in all reality, junior year is the start of planning our futures and to most sophomore students that is too scary of a concept to even consider. Going to college, getting a job, having to do our own laundry; it is all just too much.

But taking the plunge right now, at the end of our sophomore year, might just be the key to saving some of those tears for happy occasions, like winning the lottery. People like Hannah Clauss know all about getting ahead early.

“I want to be done with the ACT by the December test so I’m planning on taking it all fall because I don’t want to have the stress of doing it later in my junior year,” sophomore Hannah Clauss said.

The key word I think Clauss used was stress. Stress is the number one enemy to a high school student and yet it still manages to creep its way into every living teenager’s mind and eat away at their self-confidence and all hope of ever having a happy future. That might sound a bit dramatic but the truth of the matter is that stress is what everyone tries to avoid because it sucks. So why aren’t more people trying to do what Clauss is and avoid the big S?

Because we’re still too young and dumb to understand that what we as a sophomores and juniors now can affect our future big time. Just ask anyone who ever starred on MTV’s 16 and Pregnant; one mistake can change your whole life, and soon enough you have a screaming baby being taken away by child services after your mug shot was featured on the nightly news, not a fun time.

So, I believe more sophomores need to take their education into their hands and really start working towards some of their goals because if you don’t start now you start later, which means people are in front of you, which means your hopes and dreams of getting into the perfect school just got crushed because the girl you called a teacher’s pet beat you on the ACT.