What We Learned from Junior Year

In a 2022 interview with People magazine promoting her program to empower young girls through sport, professional tennis player and mental health advocate Naomi Osaka said: “For me, the biggest lesson I’ve learned is to try to be present in each moment. It’s easy to lose sight of how far you’ve come, but I’ve been prioritizing trying to live in the moment and enjoy the journey.”

Write an essay that argues your position on the extent to which Osaka’s claim about embracing the present moment is valid.

That was my and my classmates’ prompt for the 2025 AP Language and Composition exam in May. Despite the time constraint of mere minutes, I was blessed enough to have had the presence of mind to argue a position which I mostly agree with today, citing a Merle Haggard song, a Michael Knowles original quote, and none other than Speaker Mike Johnson (hoping my scorer didn’t have a vendetta against right wingers or country music). Other than my “sources,” I don’t remember much about what I wrote, however I do remember walking away from my desk thinking about everything I had failed to discuss. 

Although I may be the only one, I couldn’t help myself from rethinking an entirely new response to the prompt. I know it is important to live in the moment, but what about thinking about the future? I know that, as Haggard sings, we need to “stop rolling down hills like a snowball headed for hell,” meaning that we shouldn't become a walking amalgamation of stress over what our future brings, but I also know that if we never roll at all, we will never move to different parts of life. But after a while of contemplation, this rather unpleasant moment made me realize what I had taken from my junior year of high school. 

Almost everyone I’ve ever spoken to has cautioned that junior year will be the most stressful, most busy, and least fun year I will endure in my secondary years. But I found nearly the opposite. It was exactly the struggles that junior year brought, that made me learn to find comfort in the struggle, and be thankful for all the bad experiences, because they are what made us who we are today.

I’m not sure how many of my peers I can speak for when I say this, considering the amount of secondary school sacrilege I have already committed by rehashing an AP exam, or by promoting being thankful for our struggles, however, if I haven’t already lost that part of my audience yet, I beg you to hang on. Maybe you’ll find that you learned something this year too. 

I hope going into the real world, I don’t minimize the experiences thrown at me now. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, and when we look back at the “simpler times,” we tend to discount them as problems that simply were not, but there is value in every burden we carry. This may have been the worst year of your life (although Michael Knowles believes it could always be worse), but we all have the unique opportunity to learn that through these times, we can become better people, and learn two skills I believe we have never been officially taught in the classroom how to do. 

I have learned that the value of “embracing the present moment” lies in learning to listen and learning to speak. Which is what junior year seems to be for. 

Eleventh grade is when we begin to obtain leadership positions, positions where the most important skills are to listen and to speak. We cannot do so if we are not truly present in the moment, and if we fail to listen and speak, we fail to be successful leaders.

I was one of the moderators for our school’s debate club, my first taste of what it was like to be one of those politicians being grilled on one of those news shows. If you are a skilled politician, you know all the arguments and all of the counterarguments. You can (and often do) stop listening and begin speaking once you know where the anchor is taking their argument. You don’t need to listen to her whole reel, just enough to process the buzzwords. On a news show, this is understandable. Since both sides are only in it to advertise their side’s beliefs, they don’t need to concern themselves with making a genuine personal connection. But it is often forgotten that our representatives are our servants. When we begin speaking to the people we serve, from national constituents to school club members, we often do the same thing. But who are we serving if we stop listening halfway through their thoughts to craft our own rebuttals? 

Junior year (and Speaker Mike) taught me that we ought to deal faithfully with the one thing that is put in front of us every day. The odds of your reelection, the outcome of the debate, or the likelihood of winning a superlative do not matter as much as what our friends must share with us at this moment. They are speaking for a reason, so we should attempt to listen, and live in the moment we are put in.

Once it is our turn to speak, we must say what we believe honestly and charitably. For what kind of leaders, friends, public servants are we if we do not? 

I know I’m not the only one that thinks about what I could have, should have, or would have said if I had just thought of it in the moment of the conversation. What I have also noticed about this phenomenon is that the more we think about how we may have turned out in an alternate universe, the civility of our thoughts decreases exponentially.

I have a friend who gets caught up in quite some wild drama, and has detailed some of her verbal altercations with fellow classmates. As an educated junior would do, I listened intently, waiting for her to give me the opportunity to respond. As she thought about these encounters, I noticed that for every minute added, her “shoulda, coulda, woulda” comebacks grew increasingly less polite, and more standoffish. 

I do this too. There are still conversations about various subjects with various people from months ago that I rehash late at night. I assure myself that if I ever had a time machine, the first thing I would go back and do is make my jokes more witty, comments more spicy, and quips even more mean, as if I did not have anything more important that I could do with a piece of fantastical technology. Yet I do it much less now. When I gave my freshman friend a word of advice, something to the extent of “it already happened, so stop wallowing in the past,” I realized that my junior year taught me how to speak as well.

As juniors, this year has brought us the closest to the senior class that we have even been. I made considerably more senior friends than I ever imagined I would have, which makes the end of this year the saddest one yet. I’ve sat in majority senior classes, and listened to them rehash their best memories over the years. We juniors have already begun this process too. With the beginning of scholarship and application essays, and requests for resumes and activity sheets, we have been forced to look back at the most transformative moments in our lives. This process has made me realize that all the most formative moments in mine and my peers’ experiences have been unexpected, spontaneous, and when we were simply living in the moment, listening the hardest, and speaking with the most honesty.

And so, this is what we learned from junior year.