Students should avoid unrealistic workloads

By taking every single advanced course offered, students are stretched far too thin. They are unable to provide their true interests with proper time commitment to excel. Course sign-ups have become a test of how much can be crammed into the a schedule. Students should recognize that enough is enough when they begin staining their GPAs with sweat and blood.

To start, students should realize that when they take four or five AP classes, the quality of their work inevitably will decline. For the average student, it is not feasible to expect that with more APs, the only product will be an inflated GPA.

According to polls conducted by The Talon, stress is at least partially correlated to the number of Honors/ AP classes students take.

Those who take more and more and just expect to “deal with it” are entirely delusional, as they seem to forget that APs are meant to provide high school students with a glimpse at the challenging curriculum and pace of a college course. APs are a serious time commitment, and even college students don’t take seven classes at once.

“As students, obviously taking all these hard classes would ensure us having less sleep, less time for friends, less time for all this stuff,” junior Stefan Tian said. “But as society as a whole, we have to do it just to stay afloat. As a school, we will not get into the good colleges if we don’t take these classes because [students at] every other school will be taking these classes.”

According to Stefan, hopes of making money in the future spur students to make painful decisions and sacrifices in the present.

“Even if they do lose some sleep, that’s what a good student takes,” Stefan said.

But is it fair to blame society for its ills, when we ourselves prolong them by drowning ourselves in the CollegeBoard’s mud puddle? Those who can adapt learn to tread water, but even then only barely above the tumultuous surface.

Students should not be so naïve as to believe that happiness is only temporarily absent for the college sprint. College is four years too, and after that there will be graduate school and life. Habits formed now will stick; how students deal with stress now will become precedent for how they react in the future.

It is downright foolish to adopt the “It won’t happen to me—I’m different” attitude and even more terrifying to accept this perpetual cycle of stress as inevitable. As many flaws as there are in the dreamy mantra that a career should be something you love, shouldn’t it?

If students take less advanced courses, focus on their interests and engage in extracurricular activities that they are earnestly interested in, they will have more time to do better on the things they love. Colleges will see them as specialists, and they can still be well-rounded without an AP assessment in May to prove it.

According to junior Drew Eller, who was slightly overwhelmed when he took several honors classes last year, less is definitely more.

“I just don’t feel as stressed out this year,” Drew said. “There’s a lot of work, but this year it’s been easier to handle. The subjects interest me more.”

Unfortunately, genuine interest in a subject is underrated. The benefits of loving a class don’t become evident until that interest begins to act as inspiration for better, more efficient work—which turns out to be very quickly.

At the end of the day, it depends on the individual. Some can take all the APs on the list because they can function without sleep. There will always be sacrifices in life, but it is vital that students remember that college is not a finish line at all, but rather the starting block. So be sure to ask yourself if you know your limits when the actual starting pistol goes off.