Junior year of college is renowned as the most important year of your education and arguably one of the most important years of your entire life. Junior year is important because your course load is usually not comprised of the many introductory, or lower level, courses in which you were enrolled during your freshman and sophomore year. In addition to having a more rigorous course load, during your junior year you usually find yourself more involved with extracurricular activities, which includes acquiring leadership positions in those same extracurricular activities. Above everything else, however, your junior year is usually when you begin to acquire internships that involve your area of study and/r it is usually the year that you begin to apply to or take the entrance exams for professional and graduate schools. Junior year is stressful because you know that you are very close to entering the "real world," and, more often than not, your role in the "real world" is still uncertain. If this is how you feel, you're not alone. Just remember that everyone is in the same boat and that everything works out in the end, even if it seems like is doesn't at times. Here are 17 things that all college juniors understand:

1. On a daily basis, you freak out about what you are going to do after you graduate college:

2. Because, at all costs, you will not be this guy after graduation:

3. But each time someone asks you what you are going to do after you graduate, this is pretty much all you have to say:

4. Every college junior ever: "It's junior year, now I need to buckle down and get serious!" Were you not serious before?

5. Because you are getting serious, you want to impress graduate schools (or professional schools), and future employers, so you enroll in more, and much harder, courses than usual.

6. To show graduate (or professional) schools, and/or future employers, that you stand out amongst their application pool, you also make sure that you pack your schedule with extracurricular activities and volunteer work.

7. The common fear that invades your nightmares until you have a post-graduation plan:

8. When you express your post-college fears to your family and friends, they always tell you that everything works out in the end...

9. ...and that you just have to keep working as hard, and as best, as you can...

10. ...but you refuse to accept their advice until everything actually works out.

11. So you continue to worry about your future even though you probably don't have anything to worry about.

12. Regardless of your anxieties, you continue to work hard in all of your courses...

13. ...and you continue to prepare for graduate school (or professional school) entrance exams...

14. ...or you continue searching for your post-college job.

15. And you always remember to enjoy your last four semesters as a college student.

16. But no matter what your situation is, all college juniors feel as if they are going to have to basically fight to the death to get a job in the real world.

17. As long as you persevere, however, you will eventually find your place in the working world; and when that day comes, your family will congratulate you as you stand there in disbelief.