Junior year?? What??? Noo, I want to go back into hiding

[pastwatcher]

The prospect of being a junior, two years older than incoming freshmen, the most active class in activities--being an officer in HRSFA, the Noteables, /and/ Uchoir--being forced to start specializing (not to mention grad courses) in math, picking a thesis topic at the end of the year, etc., etc., ...is actually quite frightening. Help!! It seems like this is the most important part of college, except that it seems like that every year, and each year is so different...but help!

That said, I'm coming up to Harvard on Saturday afternoon; I have rehearsal until 4, and probably want to be around my room or a couple of others until after dinner. But just to let people know, I'll be around. Oh, and my mouth looks a little scraped up, but that's just because all of my wisdom teeth are gone.

I should be packing. I really hate packing. I will now pack a bit more, then go into coping mechanisms; I have good ones at the moment, because the Deryni series is good. I'm not even freaked out about getting my hair trimmed tomorrow--must have something to do with the wisdom teeth, or the fact that it is /finally/ long enough to possibly be okay afterwards.

Does anyone have anything to say about how junior year compares with freshman, sophomore and senior years? It was actually the start of quite a /good/ time for me in high school, and not because that's when I started taking /undergrad/ math classes, but that was different.

Comments

[lord-codfish.livejournal.com]

Hey, don't complain - some of us are seniors. (Auugh!!)

One nice thing about junior year is that you finally feel like you know the drill. Freshman year, I really had no clue where anything was or how to get things done much of the time, and some of that was true sophomore year, especially with the move to the houses. But by junior year, you have more things to do, but they're not scary or strange any more. Doesn't make it easier, necessarily, but it is a nice change.

[dumble.livejournal.com]

Junior year is So Much Better than Sophomore year. As Cody said, sophomore year is still really new in a lot of ways. But things stop changing so much junior year. As far as math goes, I really appreciated having more flexibility over my class choices (whereas you're basically just taking all the required intro courses sophomore year). And socially, you'll find that now that you know the drill, you don't mind that the freshmen look up to you and expect you to know what's going on. Because you *do* know what's going on. So basically, you're entirely prepared to enjoy this year without yet having to start worrying about what comes next.

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

Ah, but does the rest of the world start to care about you again, like freshman year?

[lord-codfish.livejournal.com]

The world doesn't, though Junior Parents' Weekend is kind of fun. On the other hand, junior year is the time when your department(s) start to care about you. I'm not suggesting that they don't already - EPS skunks even EAS in doing cool things for undergrads - but they start to focus on your academic work much more, so that the thesis-topic-choosing process isn't entirely on your own. It's rather nice.

Senescent babble

[ophblekuwufu.livejournal.com]

Freshman year you sort of get cared about for free. After that, people will still care about you, but they'll expect you to meet them half-way, to reach out to them and show them you want to be friends.
Junior year is great because you're settled and confident enough that it isn't as /scary/ to reach out.

If it's any comfort, sophomore and senior years are probably harder than freshman and junior years. Imagine freshman year as childhood, sophomore year as adolescence, junior year as adulthood, and senior year as senescence, and you aren't that far off the mark.

That makes sophomore year the place where lots of people alternate between yearning for the protection given freshman and itching for the responsibility given upperclassmen, of growing disillusioned with the old guard and trying to figure out how to carve out a place for yourself. I don't promise that the beginning of next year will suddenly be perfect (we can all attest that young adulthood can be pretty rocky), but if you follow true to form, I predict that at some point next year you'll find that you've reached a stable and satisfactory equilibrium (perhaps surprisingly far away from where you started, or perhaps surprisingly close.)

(It's not quite that bad as all that for seniors, of course. You deal with some of the same issues of learning to accept that you'll lose the world you've known, and that it will change and go on without you. On the other hand, you pass away from it not into oblivion but into the rest of your life--a pretty good deal, all things considered).

[dumble.livejournal.com]

Nope, sorry. Harvard stops caring after you're a freshman.

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

I am, I have to admit, a little worried about thesis topic. Given that I don't mind work, so much, I'm thinking half of the trouble in writing a thesis is simply going to be finding a topic. At least you can pull out of a thesis, if you feel like it!

[dumble.livejournal.com]

Geez, why are you guys already thinking about thesis topics? *I* don't have a thesis topic yet! =)

[pastwatcher]

That /does/ make me feel better. But note that Alexa and I number among the ranks of people who like to know what they're doing as early as possible in order to reduce panic. (Not that I think of you as less prone to panic, just more competent.)