July 5, 2024 - High School: A Retrospective
I recently graduated from high school. I got to say it passed much quicker than I thought it would. It may be due to COVID-19 taking away 2 years, or it might be other factors as well. Who knows? Regardless, it's odd now being older than most anime characters I grew up watching and admiring!
Prelude
When I was in grade 8, probably due to the incomprehensible increase of time I had on my hands due to COVID-19, I got really into anime. Through the power of my first generation iPad Air at the time, I would finish around 12-24 episodes a day. Now that I do the math, it amounts to roughly 8 hours of binge watching a day. In hindsight, it was like my full time job was watching anime. Needless to say, I got acquainted with quite a few series.
Namely, there is an anime called Ansatsu Kyoushitsu (Assassination Classroom). Although it's a little edgy to my liking today, it really set the tone of what high school was going to be like. Ignoring all of the “omg, I need to kill my sensei or else the world blows up” plot, it really was just about highschool students with personal struggles trying to fit into an unwelcome environment. Then throughout the story, their teacher, whom they have to kill, would provide solutions for the problems the students suffered throughout their lives. In addition, the constant reminders of graduation, exams, and field trips in the anime made me more excited about what was to come in high school. I thought there would be more fun field trips and more exciting school topics to learn in the coming years. I'll later come to see that I was wrong.
Scene from Assassination Classroom
So throughout the second half of eighth grade, although I was still on the anime grind, I also started to feel worried about school. Most anime I watched at the time such as Assassination Classroom were about students who weren't good enough in their schools, so they got punished. I was probably in a distorted reality realm from watching so much anime, but I seriously got worried about my future. As a consequence, I started a productivity grind.
Around that time as well, was when I got my first computer. So during that productivity phase, I would wake up, code, play a game called “osu!”, eat some food, and go back to sleep. Rinse and repeat. There wasn't really anything interesting in my life at the time, but this really set me up for the future. I found out about my interest in computer science during this time period, and that I have really poor time management. Two things that usually go hand in hand…
My New Laptop
The Let Down
After getting hyped up about high school, the reality sunk in after a few days. My first year of high school started in 2020, which if you didn't know, was when COVID-19 was instilling fear into everyone who breathed. So my school set up a system to minimize contact with people by having 1 class for 2 weeks, then rotate the other classes throughout the semester. It was a horrid system.
All I did during that time was play video games and piano. I did barely anything school related. You may also read more about that on my previous blog post in 2021 where I ranted about online school.
Grade 10 was basically the same experience as grade 9 because of the pandemic yet again.
Fast forward to grade 11, much has changed. My friends, my personal life, the school system, and even the teachers. Since I was doing online school in grade 9 and grade 10, I had different teachers than other people who went to my home (physical) school. I was not well acquainted with any of the teachers at my school, which is really not what I want when I start to need references for summer programs and university applications.
But fear not, I knew I was an academic demon. I think the highlight of that year was when I was sleeping in my math class for an entire unit, and I still aced the test. I remember being more shocked at getting that mark than anything else I remember prior.
Me in Math Class
In the end, no one really cares about the first three years as they don't really impact your future much.
Revelation:
If you're a stem student in Canada, you've likely heard about a summer program called Shad. Basically, it's a program where high school students in grade 10 and 11 go to a Canadian university for a month during the summer to do stem and entrepreneurship workshops. It really is more exciting than it sounds.
At the camp, I met some really outstanding people. Mind you, it's not a program where everyone can go as it is application based, and it usually fills out with some of the most outstanding students in the country.
From aspiring doctors to lawyers to finance bros, there were a lot of different people at the camp. It gave me an eye-opening experience that there are so many people in the world better than me. I may be top of the food chain in my small town, but I am nothing in the world.
After I got home from the camp, I knew exactly what I needed to do. Since I was basically certain I wanted to do computer science in university, I started doing leetcode, dmoj, and relearning many coding languages I learned during my productivity phase in grade 8. I knew that to get into my dream university program (Waterloo CS), I had to improve myself. So I started to market myself too.
Lakehead University Campus Next to Lake
Execution and Lesson
As soon as school started, I snatched 2 club president roles, and 1 club executive role in my school. I joined the peer tutoring program (something I vowed to myself that I wouldn't do), and I started to build new connections. Most of that culminated into a hackathon I ran with two other schools called NRGHacks. I won't go into details, but it was pretty successful considering there were only three schools involved but over 100 hackers.
After doing all of that, I've realized how much high school is a scam. Everyone in the school environment would always feel like they were running out of time to do things. Even my friends, who are in grade 10 feel like they don't have time to do things anymore. After building up most of my extracurriculars within a single year (in the span of a few months), I felt like that mindset was stupid. One year is a lot of time. If you're currently a high school student and feel like you have no more time, trust me on this: you have a lot of time left, use it! The same friends who would complain that their life is over because they don't have extracurriculars or grades; I don't see them spending their time doing things. Everyday, I see them in a discord server on call playing League of Legends. Now something that isn't very wise to do ever is play that game.
Regardless, high school may not be what you expect, but it is not as bad as it seems. You'll get to meet many people in school and out of school that will inspire you, and 4 years is a lot of time. Anything can happen, so take every opportunity that arises.
Selfie with Shad Hoodie in Thunder Bay