Whether you’re a part of a team, a Student Body Officer, or just a regular kid attending school, the friends students make can affect how they see school. Friends can open up a world with drama, fun, and socialization, but if they influence someone too much it can change their views on anything they might see differently. This can worsen their grades more than help them.

Friends can be a delightful distraction from homework and stress but that can influence students to focus on their peers more than school. “My close friends help me with my many mood swings I have at school. Having them around helps me with my work,” said sophomore AJ Rios “But having a bigger group, more friends, and popularity can be more distracting”

Even the more “popular” students can see their peers matter more than grades. How popular they are or how popular students want to be can change how anyone acts in school. Junior student Tristan Lee said, “The more popular someone is the more they worry about what others think.”

If a student does not have many friends or just floats around at school and activities they can tend to fall out of their education or even out of passions because they might not have people there with them.

“Peer pressure can depend on everything you do but not having friends can make you see education as a waste of time due to all the people there that affect your everyday.” Students might not even have many people support them. This can be a big problem because if students love to do something but they start feeling self-conscious being alone, it may not motivate them anymore. This in turn can make them fall out of their school time, seeing it as a depressing time more than focusing on their future.

Plenty of groups of students are seeing their education in different ways; it’s a surviving game, it’s a fun time with people they love. Even if students have a lot of friends or none at all, what people do around them should not always determine what they should do or not do in school. Students shouldn’t let their friends or peers become their stress or their opinions when comes to their education.