Balancing School and PGT

After completing my junior year of High School, I can honestly say that doing PGT this season was the right choice, maybe even the best choice of all time. I had decided late in the fall that this spring would be far too hectic for me to be involved with a PGT show. Junior year is arguably the most academically challenging, particularly in the spring because of exams. This choice was so logical on paper. It made all the sense in the world to take a season off and focus on my studies. “So I can get into college,” I would tell people.

But after spending a gloomy January afternoon sitting on my couch trying to justify this decision to myself, I found there really was no sense in it at all. Junior year is supposed to be the worst, right? So why in the world would I eliminate the one constant in my life that makes it all okay? The idea of not doing PGT was far more baffling to me than spending a whole semester with only my books. So on the night before the final day of spring auditions, I decided I just had to enroll. I would make it work. Yes, junior year is hard, and there was a good deal of stress involved. But the thought of doing all of that schoolwork without being able to rehearse, learn, and grow with my favorite people? That seems pretty impossible. I’m really not sure how I would’ve gotten through it all. Sometimes there were late nights of homework after rehearsal and sometimes I had to sacrifice more of my free time to work. Nonetheless, I found that I had such a greater incentive to work hard in school knowing that there was some type of reward, a light at the end of the tunnel. I gained a breadth of knowledge from taking part in yet another PGT production; lessons which far outweighed anything I might have gained academically. The thought of being able to create some magical wonder even in the midst of so much academic torment is a pretty remarkable thing. I’m so grateful that I made the decision to do PGT during the spring of my junior year; it provided a wonderful creative haven to my otherwise mundane academic life.