For junior Rachel Schenck, her schedule is packed to the brim with advanced classes as well as extracurriculars.

Rachel is a multi-sport athlete. This winter, she is on the FHC wrestling team and is already hard at work doing preseason training for water polo. Along with all of this, she also was on the swim team earlier this year. 

“I started swimming like a decade ago,” said Rachel. “I’ve been keeping up with it [since then] and I did Rays, which is a club sport, and we had a few meets here and there as well as over the summer. Water polo was like ‘well, of course you are going into it after swimming’ because I really like water sports.”

Unfortunately, Rachel has had to give up many things in order to not make her schedule too overwhelming.

“I used to play soccer for a while,” Rachel admits, “but I just had to decide that there wasn’t enough time in the school day to do it. Water polo is just like soccer in the water and it’s super fun. You have a ball, but besides that, there is also a lot of swimming. We used to do club swimming during the winter but decided to join the wrestling team. We had initially wanted to get the whole swim team to do it because it would be so fun to do another sport with them.”

Amidst all of her after school sports, Rachel is able to keep up an impeccable academic record; she is involved in almost all AP classes.

“A lot of classes have a natural progression,” Rachel said. “Like for English you, of course, have Honors and then you go to AP. There really isn’t any middle ground: there is no ‘Honors’ for eleventh and twelfth grade so that is what made me choose to go into AP Lang. I find [AP classes] interesting and most of them move at a faster pace which I like because I don’t enjoy being bored in my classes.”

In Rachel’s eyes, the fast pace of her classes ties in with the advanced learning style of the courses. In her case, this tipped her decision towards taking more of them.

“As of right now, I am taking AP Chemistry for my first and second hours,” said Rachel. “It is really fun, we get to do a lot of labs, and it’s a really small class [which I like about AP Chemistry]. For third hour, I am in Spanish—which is also an AP class—and it is really different since it is more about culture than it is vocab. You can really connect more to it and it shows you a different aspect of the language. Then, I have AP Government which I enjoy because I can hear about what is going on [in the world] now compared to how it was back then. Finally, I have AP Lang and computer programming.”

Despite all of these heavyweight classes, Rachel doesn’t find herself too stressed about her homework load.

“Surprisingly, [the AP classes I am taking] don’t have as much homework as most people would expect,” Rachel said. “Most days I have, maybe, 15 minutes of actual homework at home because I can usually get most of it done during class in school. No, [my schedule has never become overwhelming] and I think it’s just because most of the teachers understand that if you are in one AP class then you are involved in other things as well, such as sports, extracurriculars, and, of course, other AP classes. They don’t ever really give you all that much and what they do give you, I believe, is reasonable and can be done pretty quickly.” 

On top of everything, Rachel is also an avid reader. For as long as she can remember she has always liked to read.

“I used to read more,” admits Rachel, “because I always used to have more time, but with high school sports I don’t have as much as I would like. Books just really intrigue me; I like the way that most authors just write and the way that the words flow and the pictures that they can create. I read probably a book a day, or a book every two days.”

Even throughout Rachel’s busy schedule, she leaves time to enjoy life and to appreciate the little things. For her, it is all about staying on top of things to get the most out of life.

“A lot of people like to procrastinate,” Rachel said. “When you choose to that all the time and just forget about [homework], or tell themselves ‘okay I will just do a page of this and I will just go and have some fun,’ it seems to just prolong the experience and takes you more time to do your homework. While if you can do it and get it all done first and then have fun afterward it just seems to go much faster.”