Feature: How Jacquelyn Burrer Balanced Both!

Hi! My name is Jacquelyn Burrer, and I’m going to be a senior for the next school year. Over the course of my 3 years in the Hebron Band, I’ve had an unusual amount of extracurricular experience, so I’m going to write about how I did it! Hope you enjoy, and if you have any questions, you can contact me at burrerj@go.lisd.net

Starting off with going into freshman year, I was in band, choir, and cheer at my middle school and was trying to decide what to do in high school. My older sister was a part of many different organizations as a high schooler as well and did band, choir, theater, and many other extracurriculars, so I figured that I could try to do the same thing. I couldn’t do all 3, so I ended up pursuing band and cheerleading.

During freshman year, I took AP Human Geography, Pre-AP Biology & Geometry, and GT Pre-AP English (with the infamous Mr. Willard). I was really nervous because I knew that the classes would be pretty difficult, but thankfully, my teachers understood that I had a lot going on. Entering high school and transitioning into a higher academic level is always scary, but my teachers made the transition a lot easier for me and were always there for me. For example, my Human Geography teacher would always ask if I needed a special tutorial time to fit with my rehearsal schedule. I ended with an A in Biology and high B’s in my other classes, which wasn’t what I was hoping for going into the year, but I was still in a good range for GPA and rank (especially once I got used to high school courses). 

On the aspect of actually managing band and cheer at the same time, the coaches and directors were extremely flexible with my schedule. For example, during August, I would go to cheer camp for half of the day and band camp for the other half. It was pretty exhausting physically, but I got used to it pretty quickly because I loved doing it. Once the school year started, I had my 2 core classes in the morning, went to tutorials during block lunch, and then went to band and cheer for the last half of the school day, followed by marching rehearsal after school. I would have different games I had to cheer at each week, and my coaches and the directors worked with me so that I would split my time in between rehearsal and cheering (sometimes I would run down to the field after finishing cheering and just finish rehearsal in my cheer uniform, which was always a funny sight to see). Overall, doing band and cheer was absolutely doable, especially due to the flexibility that the staff at Hebron has. If you’re going to try to balance multiple activities at Hebron like I did, my advice is to always email everyone with all of the conflicts you know about as far ahead as you can. The conflicts themselves arise, but as long as you talk to the directors about, they’ll always work with you.

I ended up quitting cheer going into my sophomore year because I needed to take a foreign language and pursue other activities, but I would still recommend trying all of the activities you can, especially as a freshman, because it’s an opportunity that gets harder as you get older. During my sophomore year, I ended up joining FCCLA, Latin Club, JSA, and other various clubs and organizations. I wasn’t as busy as I was freshman year, but I was still incredibly busy with different activities I was doing. I focused more on getting my grades up and spent most of my time reading. 

Going into my junior year, I became an Officer for Latin Club, Vice President for JSA, and I was a librarian for band (basically a music organizer - it sounds bizarre, but it’s actually very fun). I started to learn about my passion for political activism during my sophomore year, but my junior year allowed me to start pursuing more opportunities. I revamped JSA into a political discussion club, began volunteering on various campaigns, organized different voter registration events, and basically just did anything I could to gain experience. Junior year is your hardest year academically because you have hard classes on top of ACT/SAT tests. However, once you have more experience in high school courses, you learn the best way to study and classes actually start to get easier. Because I had the experience from my freshman year of balancing different activities, I began to start looking for more political opportunities while being in school. I volunteered on more campaigns, joined the March for Our Lives chapter in McKinney, and spent as much time as I could (while still being involved with band and balancing classes) to read and study politics. I ended up ending with the best grades I’ve ever gotten in high school this past 9 weeks in extremely hard classes (I ended with a 98 in AP US History), all while I was interviewing and pursuing more political opportunities. I recently became a Fellow on a political campaign in Michigan and will be working on it for the next couple months, and I also recently got a Writer Internship with The Borgen Project to advocate and fight global poverty after weeks of interviewing. This upcoming year as a senior, I’m going to be working a lot to save up money for college, and I just joined the newspaper team as well, so I’ll be very busy again. Pursuing band and cheer my freshman year honestly gave me the experience I needed to understand how to balance all of these things, which is why if you’re interested in multiple activities, I say do as many as you can.

To all the 8th graders reading this, I know that high school seems scary and that band seems like something that will take up your entire life - I promise it’s not. I’m still super involved with band, and plan on staying involved, and it’s incredibly manageable to do all of these things. The majority of kids in band aren’t going to go into band but being a part of this band allows you to learn more about yourself and your interests. Although being in band does take up a lot of time, it also pushes you towards trying new things and learning more about yourself. If you’re trying to decide between two activities or you’re worried your grades might slip because you’re too busy, I promise it’ll all work out. My advice is to just try it! If you end up quitting one activity, pick up a different one! High school is the time to learn about yourself and have fun, and if you’re interested in band, just try it! You’ll never know if you’re able to handle it unless you do it. Even though I ended up quitting cheer, I will never regret doing both of those my freshman year because it helped me find my passion. Again, if you have any questions about how I handled doing all of these activities or any questions in general, just reach out!