It is popular to have a part time job when you are in high school. It is a part of the whole growing up phase. Often, either your parents want you to have a job, or you need extra cash for necessities. A lot of students seem to juggle school life and work life and it is amazing how much one person can handle at once. Class work can get difficult, and trying to fit social relationships in with your plans can become stressful and a hassle in everyday life. Yet so many students are able to do it, or claim that they can.

Having stress at a young age is unhealthy and can build up especially if you are working your first job or you take Advanced Placement classes. Everything building up on top of one another can cause a major blow up in feelings when it is bottled up, which can affect everything in your life. Juggling tests and a job along with home life and social life becomes a challenging task. Senior Jessie Estes says, “I lose downtime. I don’t have enough time to spend with friends. My stress levels are usually fine unless I have a test. Most of the time it’s easy to handle everything.” Trying to fit in time for studying is considered a balancing act especially for the students who work twenty hours or more a week.

So how much should you work a week? The legal number of hours a student can work a week is 20, but your parents can sign a form to allow you to work more than that. Students also work later into the night, especially on weekends. Some not even getting home until after 9:00 p.m. Junior Miles McMahan says, “I don’t typically get home until 12 a.m. on the weekends.” The most a student can work on a non-school day is eight hours and cannot work past 10:00 p.m. According to an on Middle Earth, “Students who work more than 20 hours a week are more likely to do drugs and drink alcohol.” Yet students have a lot of pressure from their parents to maintain their jobs and school work when they can.

There are benefits to having a job however. Some teens have cars and need to pay for gas and insurance. Teenagers like to have extra money for clothes, food, and extra necessities as well. They also gain social skills and having a job can give them great practice for problem solving. Senior Valentina Villegas says, “Having a job is worth it. It readies me for college and builds my social [skills],” Along with the stress, there are some benefits to working a part time job. It also helps teens learn lessons in personal finance and how, when, and why they should save money. They are able to save up for college and are able to afford school books or anything extra they may need.

Numbering your priorities becomes a big task when you get a job. You have to decide what is more important to you and what you need to get done first and when it needs to be done by. Villegas says, “One particular struggle is organizing my time for each class. [It] depends on how much homework I have in each class and what day things are due.” When things become too difficult, voicing out your troubles could save you a lot of damage that could occur if you stay quiet and do not speak up about your worries.

Jobs can be the highlight of your year or the worst. It all depends on how you handle it and if you are able to cope with the stress. If you have easy classes and have a lot of free time, then having a job could be potentially easy. Pressure from everyone can make you choose something that you do not necessarily want to do. But it does prepare you for real life experiences and situations for the real world.