Wrapping Up Sophomore Year Strong: Your 5-Step Checklist
If you’re like most high school sophomores, there’s a beautiful stretch of time after AP exams and finals where school finally starts to feel lighter again. Most of your grades are finalized, club meetings are beginning to wrap up, and homework starts to feel less burdensome. It’s tempting to use this extra time before summer activities begin to take your foot of the gas, and if you’ve felt overwhelmed and exhausted all year long, it’s absolutely to your advantage to give yourself some extra breathing room these last few weeks. You’ve earned the rest!
But there are a couple of easy, actionable steps you can take to make sure all the hard work you’ve done this year pays off — think of these five steps as gift to “future you.” They’re easy, simple, but meaningful, and will pay off in dividends when you return to school in the fall as a junior.
1. Do a Time Study
Attention is the most precious resource we have, and it is being systematically stolen from us in tiny fragments. — Johann Hari
Ever feel like you’re “always studying?” Or have no time to relax? It’s time to get honest with where your time is going. Most of us know that we’re living in an age of distractions, and one of the best ways to get a better hold on your time is to conduct a personal time study to figure where time is being used.
A time study is the process of taking one real week from your life and writing out where your hours actually go in practice. Your goal is to get beyond how you “feel” about time and into the nitty-gritty minute-by-minute breakdown so you can see where you can get more out of your day between school, activities, homework, rest, and everything else in-between.
A time study starts with taking one “normal” week from the past year and writing out hour-by-hour how you spent our time.
A typical Monday might look like this:
6:00 — 6:30 AM: Hit snooze
6:30 — 7:30 AM: Wake up, get dressed, head to school
7:45 AM — 2:30 PM: School
2:30 – 6:30 PM: Marching Band
6:30 – 7:30 PM: Heading home + eating dinner before starting homework
7:30 – 10:30 PM: Focused homework time on hardest classes - Pre-Calc, AP Bio
10:30 – 12:00 AM: Study break - phone time, Netflix, talking to friends, or trying to do work while also not fully doing any one thing
12:00 – 12:45 AM: Cramming to finish an English essay before heading to sleep
When you write a few days like this, you’ll start to see patterns in how you spend your time vs. how you tend to feel about it.
In the example above, band isn’t just a “two-hour practice,” it’s really a four-hour mega block: 2 hours of rehearsal, plus getting changed, waiting for the late bus afterwards, and the stretch of time between the end of school where you can’t really start something deep like calc homework but you also can’t fully relax either. Study time isn’t actually 7 - 12:45 AM, it’s a combo of task-switching interrupted assignments, distracted breaks, frantic restarts, and stretches longer than expected because no one assignment really has your full attention.
Time studies make it easy to get past the story you’re telling yourself about your time into the facts so you can make real changes. Maybe you need to revaluate how you use the 20-minute stretch after-school to get in some downtime, or give yourself an intentional break before starting homework so you’re not staying up until 1 AM. Tiny changes can make a major difference in what you can handle and how you feel.
2. Evaluate Your Commitments
A time study also makes it easy to evaluate your commitments as a whole. As you move towards junior year, it’s crucial to start to less about the raw hours and more about the impact of your activities. If you’re spending 20 hours a week at the pool as a swimmer because you’re interested in D1 athletics, and your time is paying off with faster times and more success at weekend meets, you’re getting solid value out of your commitment to swim. But if you’re spending the same 20 hours and not progressing, it might be worthwhile to rethink the activity as a whole, especially if your practices are keeping you from exploring areas you’re interested in academically.
Ask yourself:
Do I actually see myself continuing this in college, or has it just stayed in my schedule by default?
Does this activity demonstrate something related to what I actually want colleges to know about me? (i.e. a particular value, passion, or special interest?)
Do I look forward to this activity, or does it mostly feel like something I just…do?
Am I actually building a skill or interest that I care about?
If I could do it all over again, would I choose to put my time and attention into this activity, or do something else?
Sophomore year is your time to pivot if you already sense that the activities you’re doing aren’t highly impactful.
What does that mean? Highly impactful activities are the ones that will stand out on a college application. They involve areas where you can show unique talent or a meaningful difference. For example, you might be building a Substack community focused on organizing community fridges and featuring local families who help support them, tied to a broader interest in addressing food insecurity in your area. You’ve been writing articles here and there in your free time, but if you had 10 more hours a week, that could expand into pitching the project to podcasts, conducting informational interviews with local county leaders, and writing more articles and doing more interviews. Consider making space and adjustments to less meaningful activities so you can follow the impact.
The key is to make sure you’re using any extra time that you “buy back” from your activities in an effective way. That means if you’re quitting an structured activity to make space for something more flexible, like maintaining a blog or a non-profit you founded, you need to treat it just like a formal activity by blocking out time and space in your calendar for it. Take it just as seriously. Tracking those independent hours will make life easier when you’re filling out the Common App in a few years.
3. Thank Your Teachers and Plan to Maintain Relationships
Sophomore year is also a good moment to be intentional about how you leave relationships with teachers, especially the ones who have actually shaped how you think or work this year. While a great deal of focus goes into choosing college recommenders from junior year, you haven’t had those teachers yet, and it’s always possible that you may need to rely on a sophomore teacher or two. So keep those relationships strong. You also might need recommenders next year for specialized summer programs, leadership opportunities, or awards.
Think beyond recommendation letters. Think about the classes where feedback changed your writing, or where a teacher consistently pushed your thinking in a way that stuck with you even outside of class. Take notes about your favorite topics and moments, and save them in a file. Keep all of your feedback and scored exams in a folder (and don’t lose it!). This track record is your responsibility, not your teacher’s, and will help immensely when you need to help with specifics.
And make sure to show your gratitude. simple version of this is just making sure you leave the year on a strong note instead of checking out. That can mean thanking teachers in person, sending a short note that is specific to what you learned in their class, or just making sure you close out the year by engaging with the material the same you did when it was fresh. Here are a few key questions to ask yourself.
Which teachers actually changed how I approach their subject this year?
Where did feedback push me to revise or think differently, not just improve a grade?
Which classes would I want a teacher to remember me from, and why?
What qualities do I want them to actually associate me with as a student (determination, focus, the desire to go above and beyond the taught materials, etc.)
4. Plan at Least One College Visit
It’s most common to do a slew of college visits in the spring of junior year, when spring break week turns into back-to-back tours, info sessions, and campuses that start to blur together by the end of the week. But seeing schools earlier in your high school career can help to anchor your goals before the pressure of junior year and “deciding” hits.
Even one visit in the summer after sophomore year can shift your approach in a way that will help you refine your approach to junior year. You’re not trying to make decisions yet, but you are starting to notice what kinds of environments feel motivating versus draining once you’re actually on campus, even if it’s just a nearby school or a place you’re passing through on a family vacation.
On our blog, we offer a deeper breakdown of how to make visits more intentional — beyond just walking tours and information sessions, but in short, sign up for a visit or two and ask yourself:
What kind of campus environment actually feels exciting?
What kinds of majors and special programs seem like opportunities I’d like to pursue?
Do I think I’d prefer more structured academic environments (like Columbia’s Core Curriculum) or more open ones (like Brown’s Open Curriculum)?
How do I think I’d like to spend my time outside of the classroom?
5. Start to Set Goals and Boundaries for Junior Year
Once you’ve done the time study, looked at your commitments, checked in on your teachers, and planned a visit or two, you’re already ahead of the game for junior year. But there’s no point in doing all of this evaluation, planning, and reflection if you don’t turn what you learn into action.
This is where setting both doable goals and personal boundaries becomes crucial. General goal setting is commonly taught in high school — aspire towards straight A’s, grow your nonprofit, conduct groundbreaking research. But doable goals are different. A goal that’s doable is something you have full control over, like committing to one full-focus hour at a time with a 5-minute break when you’re studying, or reaching out to five potential mentor contacts a week to try to get an internship lined up for next summer. You can’t always control the outcomes, but you can always refine the process.
Strong boundaries make doable goals possible. They help to dictate spend time with others, how you structure your activities, and how you manage your own time, tech, and stress. Sometimes it’s boundaries with your schedule, like recognizing you need to commit to leaving a club meeting at the scheduled time vs. staying over for social discussions. Sometimes it’s boundaries with your own habits, like changing how you study so you’re not regularly up until 1 a.m. for no good reason. And often it’s boundaries with your tech, like committing to keeping a phone in a different room while you’re in focus mode.
Key questions to help define some of your goals and boundaries for success in junior year.
Do I need to build better relationships with teachers before junior year starts?
Do I need to take more advanced classes to meet a college’s suggested requirements?
Do I need to change how I study so I’m not up until 1 a.m. for no reason?
Do I need to switch an activity that no longer fits where I’m going?
What boundaries do I need with myself, my family, my friends, and my activities to ensure that I’m set up for success going forward?
Closing
It can feel like it’s easier to just quietly shut the door on sophomore year and start fresh in the fall. But if you do these five things now, you’ll set yourself up to start junior year strong instead of carrying the same patterns forward.
What’s crucial is that you’re not repeating the same overload cycle or filling your schedule the same way without realizing what it costs in time, sleep, and space for the things that actually matter at a higher level.
Making the hard changes now allows you to start junior year with room for higher impact activities, more bandwidth, and more breathing room for what matters most to you.
So take the time to review, refine, and reflect now. You’ll thank yourself later.
