Although summer quickly approaches, students aren’t stopping their school work. Keeping their eyes on the prize, juniors begin preparing for senior year despite vacations and summer jobs. Summer is their opportunity to get a head start on next year’s work.
“For the most part I’m just going to be looking at colleges, getting everything organized so that I can not be in a super crunch to submit applications during senior year,” junior Brandon Barber said. “I’m doing e-school, taking government and economics, to free up my schedule. This way, I can take creative writing next year, which is something I’m hoping to be able to use in my future career.”
Other students are preparing for short term purposes.
“I’m going to probably read the book that we are required to read for Academic Decathlon over the summer break and think about what I’m going to write my speech about before marching band starts,” junior Brian Zeff said. “They told us at the meeting that there will be a lot of reading and annotating that we would have to keep up with on our own that first semester to help prepare us for the competition, [so] I won’t be crammed to do it during the year, with marching band going till 6 p.m. three nights a week and then 1 a.m. on Friday. I won’t have a lot of free time.”
Band is another activity that takes time and practice. Band students will be preparing for marching band during band camp.
“The camp runs pretty much the entire month of August,” Barber said. “Officers and squad leaders have additional clinics, but for the month of August, the band meets and refreshes marching fundamentals, learns the music, and begins learning drill for the season.”
Other preparations are more personal to students, relating to their hobbies or aspirations.
“I’m going to be doing some writing over the summer and probably working on programming,” Barber said. “I’m looking to do both of those later in life, [but] programming practice will help me in [Computer Science 2], but also it will help me for competition teams next year. I wasn’t able to [participate] this year, but I’m hoping to next year.”
Those who haven’t finished their standardized tests will have those fall tests to look forward to.
“I’ll be doing some studying for SAT subject tests, but nothing over the top,” Barber said. “I already took both the SAT and the ACT, and I’m extremely happy with my scores, so that isn’t my main focus.”
Students are hoping to benefit from their summer preparations.
“Getting ahead will keep the stress level off of me during marching season,” Barber said. “I won’t really have free time, [and] it will really reduce my stress load during this coming year.”
