Pros and Cons of choosing classes your friends are in

How much should what your friends want, influence what you want? Is it okay to choose a sport based on those relationships? Is it okay to choose a class? 

We've written before about dealing with parental expectations, but what about dealing with your friends. 

School is the best chance you have to hang out with your friends 

You will never have this much time, with the people you care about, again. Not even at university. Even if you don't have any classes together, the time you have before school or during lunches, the free periods or on the weekend. 

It's a great time to hang out with the people you love. It's a great time to build that up. But there will be chances to do that in the future. 

Who are you friends with? 

Will choosing a class that your friends are in help or harm your chances in school? Are they likely to help you show up and push you to do better? Is it likely that you can hang out and do school work, learn Japanese or train for a sport? Or are your friendships more likely to need to be separate from school? 

Think about what you need for the future 

Some university courses have maths or science prerequisites. If you have a sense of what you want to do after school, don't let your friends preferences sabotage that. If you know you want to be a doctor, maybe it's worth taking some of those science or maths units. 

If you don't have a sense of what you want to do yet, don't let your friends cut your options out. 

You do you 

Ultimately, it is up to you what you want to study, whether you think its wise to use your classes to hang out with your sports, or whether you need to keep that separate from your studies.