Back

On High School

Just today, I was listening to a few of those high school/college freshmen advice videos on Youtube while Latexing my statistics homework. Having people talking in the background instead of the sound of cranes fighting somehow made me more productive in typing down my solutions already written on a sheet of paper. They advocated for a few things generally:

1. Start your college application early. They are extremely time consuming.
2. Challenge yourself academically. Take APs.
3. Do more extracurriculars. Find something that your passionate about.
4. Don’t waste your summer doing nothing.
5. Do your research! Make a college list where you’ll be happy regardless of which school you get into.

I agree with a lot of those. If any high school/college people stumble their way here, I’ll say (from the life experiences that I do have right now), these sounds like solid advice and by all means, do it… But there are subtleties that I disagree with in the list above. Here’s what my advice would be for people beginning and druing their high school.

1. Try to start early, but Freshmen year is … eh

Some videos I watched emphasized on starting early. Get involved in extracirriculars, taking honors and AP classes beginning your Freshmen year. If you are motivated enough by your Freshmen year, go ahead. Starting your academic journey early will not do you any harm. However, if you’re reading this as a sophomore or Junior and you’re thinking, “Crap! I wasted my first/second year doing nothing!” You’re really not missing much. A lot of colleges quite frankly doesn’t care about what you did in your first year of high school (I think Carnegie Mellon discards your first year transcript completely). Missing richness in your first and a bit of second year resume is not a big deal. Just go forward from where you are. The thing is: there’s not much you can do as a first or second year anyways. So, missing your first year is … eh.

2. Have a goal in mind

This is probably the most important thing: set a gaol for yourself for the next year and work on it for that year. Here I took year as my time unit, but it can be anything from 6 months to a few years, or even more. But it shouldn’t be less than 6 months. Also, it might or might not be permenant. You don’t have to stick with it for the rest of your high school career as long as during the time when it is your goal, you work hard for it. Also, this goal shouldn’t be college oriented, as I will elaborate later.

For example, my goal starting the second year of Freshmen year was to get better at the saxophone. It is something I genuinely enjoy and have fun doing. You can find me at the practice room almost every day for the 3.5 years of high school. I got a lot better, got scholarships from music, crafted my personal statement around it, and most importantly, I had a lot of fun and met a bunch of cool people in the process. I try to practice every other day (college is inevitably busier) even to this day.

An example of a goal that ended up changing was my academic interest. I was a hardcore biologist back then, and in my Junior year, my goal is to be more knowledgable at biology. I would watch videos on Youtube about biology (I should dedicate a post on Youtube because it helped me a ton. It’s not the best way of learning, but it is an okay way to get started) and actually read the textbook. However, I was converted to a math person by my senior year. So, my goal changed: I wanted to get better at math. I actually had a more concrete goal in mind: I want to get better at probability (the dearrangement problem is sexy). So, I started studying probability during AP chem classes (you shouldn’t do that by the way) and learned Latex. Those turned out to be really helpful later on (especially Latex).

3. Don’t do stuff for colleges

This is my biggest pet peeve: people doing things for their resume. I believe that sometimes, this can be beneficial; you might accidently discover an interesting activity that you would not otherwise have tried. However, more often than not, you will just hate it and put minimal effort into it. Now, it’s just a gigantic waste of time and putting it on your resume is outright dishonesty! For example, if you’re not interested in math, don’t join the math team because it will separate you from the rest of the applicant pool. Don’t create a club and not run it properly just to get the founder and president title. If you find yourself doing an activity or taking a role that will make you do, “Ugghh, it’s this time of the week again.” then stop doing it. I was a victim of this in my Sophmore and Junior year, I regretted greatly.

Of course, there is a thing called training. For example, as a computer scientist, I dislike coding. Nontheless, I take part in projects with significant coding parts because coding is a necessary skll for computer scientist. Unless you’re a math genius (and I am not), doing all theory is just not going to cut it. I parttake in those projects to learn the necessary skills as a computer scientist even if it can be gruesome at times.

4. Learn the fundamentals

The entirety of high school and the first two years of college will be dedicated to fundamentals. I’ll focus on math here because I’m more familar with it. The most important thing in high school math that one has to learn is visualization, or more generally, gaining an intuition for logical reasoning. Of course, math isn’t all about intuition, but good intuition goes a long way. This can be extended to other STEM courses as well. Whenever you learn a new concept, try to make sense of it in your own terms. Interpretation, regardless of where you are, is important; otherwise, the whole Frequentist vs. Bayesian thing wouldn’t exist. For non-STEM classes, this would be learning how to argue coherently. Most important things you write will be an argument of some sort. Learning how to fluently introduce your side of the story and advocate for your thoughts is very important, and is something that I’m still working on today.

Also, please know how many US Senators are there. I’ve asked this question at least 8 times as an introduction to a combinatorics problem for calc I kids and exactly 0 out of 8 answered it correctly. I don’t know a lot either, but at least be able to pass the US citizenship test.

5. Have fun

If you ask my friends, this is the phrase that I say the most. Life is too short to be unhappy. Find fun things to do and let it be things you can build a career out of. There are objectively more difficult careers. For example, being a musician is extremely tough and requires an immense amount of dedication and luck, being a professional athelete is also on a similar level, whereas a software engineer is relatively less competitive. If you find yourself willing to dedicate yourself to one of those harder careers, by all means, do it. You only live once, why leave regrets? But if you’re fortunate enough to have multiple interests, pick one and keep the others as a hobby. Unfortunately, for the more difficult professions like musicians and atheletes, most people have it decided by the time they graduate due to the nature of these fields. If that doesn’t apply, then high school is rather lenient. So, go have fun, search for what makes you happy, and try to get better at it (point 2). Happiness is more valuable than many other things, and it is probably the most important thing for a high schooler.

I doubt any actual high schooler would come and read this. But here are my (inevitably) naive point of view on what high school should be like. Good luck to those in this awkward stage of life.