By: D’Randa Hooks — OwlFeed

Follow me @WritingDranda

AP stands for Advanced Placement — the placement of a student in a high school course that offers college credit if successfully completed.  

These students are more than numbers, test scores and nerds. They are the ones desperate to succeed. We are the ones who need to succeed, the ones who don’t mind giving up sleep to ensure acceptance into our dream school.

At first we joined AP because we thought we were smart. It made sense that honors turned into APs without a blink of an eye. We  stuck with it through years of stressful tests, ridiculous teachers and downright insane assignments.

We have transformed, none of this happens on purpose, but it wouldn’t be fair to call it an accident either. The years of
challenging classes and extracurriculars we can’t seem to stop joining has molded us into spastic, sarcastic and silly people that are more adapted for a pop quiz then the average student.

Let me take you through the mindset of us all, which revolves around the most shallow thing you could image: our report cards. Nothing dictates our lives more than the single letter we are given that measures our adequacy.

Our complicated, twisted minds can understand the most complicated equations and decipher the oldest of allusions, but we are all dumbfounded when teachers try to convince us a C isn’t the end of the world. This is because to us we are hardwired to fear anything less than a B because it’s our inner instinct that drives us to believe more could have been done, or to make us say, “This isn’t the best of me. This C doesn’t even begin to represent my effort, my intellect or my goals.

In AP, your journey depends on those you trust. Its really funny and ironic that in a class as competitive as ours AP builds some of the strongest friendships you could imagine. In an AP class the only way to survive is to establish your group or clique. I’ve been in the same classes with my group of friends since seventh grade and through it all they are the ones that have you’re back.

In taking these hard classes we have been pushed to breaking points. What keeps us going is the group of people going through the same exact thing. To divide and conquer is to overcome. In AP there’s really no reason to be alone. Whether it’s academic, mental or physical, I can proudly call any of my friends for help.