But let me tell you something, it’s a lot harder nowadays. It’s not like it used to be. You have to have good, scratch that, amazing grades, a great SAT score, and enroll in extracurriculars – as many as you can. And then, maybe you might have a chance to get into the school you want – with a little luck.

Oh how encouraging.

As junior year comes to its pinnacle, we find ourselves in a scramble as many dash to calculate their semester GPA’s, memorizing endless SAT words, drowning in the workload and stressing over this ambiguous idea of the future.

Ironically however, recent studies show that the best way to get things done is to spend time doing less; a lesson rarely taught to high school students.

According to the New York Times, further research shows that “strategic renewal,” a combination of longer sleep hours, frequent vacations, and naps, led to better productivity and job performance.

The time frame from junior year until the college admissions process in which the number of sleepless nights, lost pencils and cups of coffee are too vast to count is by far the worst part of the high school experience.

And yet, Stanford researchers have found that when a male basketball player slept for 10 hours a night, his practice performance dramatically improved.

His free-throw and three-point shooting rates each increased by a whopping 9 percent

Tell that to a IB diploma candidate and they would simply laugh because to them the idea of “relaxing” leading to productivity is a foreign belief.

But in reality, it means more time to learn about yourself.

During junior and senior year, we try to busy ourselves with every club imaginable for the sole purpose of looking good in our college application never really thinking about the lack of investment we place in those clubs.

At the end of the day, you work a good four years to look good on a piece of paper.

Your SAT scores and your GPA don’t necessarily show anything other than that you had a versatile and probably stressful high school experience.

Realistically, there’s no other way to really measure it differently.

If you do the IB diploma, get good grades, join the Key Club and all the honor societies, do what “looks good,” then you might have a fighting chance . . . to be like everyone else.

We work so hard to get into the college of our dreams without taking a second glance and thinking about what we’re really interested in, and even taking a nap here and there.

Go ahead and carry on with that cup of coffee and that blog post you need to write by midnight. Don’t forget the e-cart test you need to take tomorrow and that English essay and book you need to annotate, but maybe afterwards you can dust off that piano in the corner of your room or that drawing pad hidden underneath your bed.

Have fun for goodness sakes. It’s high school even if it’s only for a minute before you have to go back into reality.