As Marking Period 3 is about to begin, many freshmen have finally settled into their first year as high school students. They have joined clubs, met their teachers and become fully acclimated to their new school environment.

Settling in was harder for some RHS freshmen than for others, however, noting stressors like the added homework, responsibilities and expectations that come with the high school experience. `

Freshman Layla Tavares said entering high school has both its challenges and rewards: “It’s a marathon, where everything matters.”

Tavares, who plays lacrosse and field hockey, noted that high school can be especially challenging for student athletes. “It’s difficult to manage and adjust at first,” she said. “When you’re a student athlete, you really need to learn how to manage your time.”

For Tavares, the positives of the transition included the new freedoms that come with a high school setting. “They’re amazing, and there is lots of leeway you didn’t have in the middle school,” she said.

Some freshmen have found the shift in their academic workload to be less difficult than others. Freshman Evan Li took on a challenging academic schedule this year, enrolling in one AP and five honors classes. Despite this, he described his workload as being, “Not bad; since I started taking honors in seventh grade, I am used to this.”

Instead, Li said his biggest struggle so far has been learning how to navigate the high school hallways. “For the first few weeks I was lost, but I was eventually able to find my way around the building,” he said.

Many of Li’s freshmen peers said they experienced similar directional challenges. This isn’t surprising, given that the middle school holds around 900 students, while the high school has around 1300, an almost 25% increase in student body size.

One freshman who said he found the transition to high school especially difficult was Eitan Cohen, who came not from RMS like most of his classmates, but from Gottesman RTW Academy, a local private school. Cohen went from having a mere 15 students in his grade to over 300 at RHS. “It’s definitely a change,” he said of his transition to RHS. “There are more faces to remember and more people to talk to, and the hallways are extremely different from the ones at Gottesman.”

Cohen stressed he was able to overcome these challenges more quickly because he has played baseball locally for years, so he already knew many of his current classmates before entering the Randolph public school district.

There’s no doubt that making the transition from middle school to high school can be daunting. But it seems that freshmen have developed their own ways of overcoming the many challenges of this change. One can almost compare it to playing an instrument; the more one plays, the better one gets. The solution simply comes with practice.