Every fall, I check my Facebook account and find many articles about starting college, dorm life, and freshman year experiences, but I never see many articles about the years in between freshman and senior year. Unlike these articles, I find sophomore and junior years of college to be just as formative and important as the other two years. Junior year in particular seems to be the most important out of the four years of college.
Junior year is the year where the amount of effort you put into your schoolwork, career, and connections will be the defining year of your college experience. No more sleeping in until 3 pm or looking for internships the last two weeks of the spring semester. It is the year a university student needs to invest their time to truly see results after they leave college.
It is also the year where your friends will show their true colors with you. When you are slammed with work and worrying about your future, will they stick around for you and support you? Or will they become bored and leave you behind?Junior year is the prime time to take a leadership role or be an active participant of an organization or club. Choose wisely, as you want the role to take to be more than just a resume filler. You want something that will truly be a learning experience that can be useful.
In the end, junior year is not some filler year in college to forget about. Just because the media does not focus on it as much when discussing the college experience, does not mean that the year is not as important as freshman or senior year. Each year of college plays an equally important role in our development and it is about time the media caught on.
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