In 6th grade I had this odd obsessions with going to Harvard Medical School or MIT. But after 6th grade I continually had terrible math experiences and also realized I hated the sight of blood - and found a love for English and History.
So, I never really thought about it much until junior year when I was like, "Yeah, I’ll apply to UGA and… uh… a safety school, and… a reach school! (An ivy league, lol.) And then I realized in the summer after it was too late that I still had all these standardized tests to take and essays to write.
Middle of 10th grade. I started moving from my dream (fantasy) of being a professional soccer player to becoming a doctor. I was coasting before that - I really wasn’t putting any effort nor was I well prepared for my SAT’s and ACT’s. I let my grades slip especially in my foreign language with a C in 9th and D in 10th! It killed my GPA. I stepped it up in my junior year adding AP classes, community service and starting a new club in my high school. And grades shot up too. Work hard… and play hard. Gotta balance them out.
9th grade. In middle school, I wanted to go to a good school, but I didn’t think about it and didn’t care about getting B’s, etc. In 9th grade, I made sure to get good grades. However, it was in 10th grade that I started actually studying etc. because school was (obviously) getting harder and so I had to start studying to get A’s.
Probably in early middle school, because I was in an accelerated program, which they claimed would get some high school clases out of the way so we could take more APs and earn college credits. However, at that point I didn’t really understand what all of that meant, so things did not get serious until probably the end of my freshman year or so.
In 9th grade, when I realized I couldn’t get a high A without studying in Precalculus. Before that I was like @allyphoe and @OMPursuit , the kid who would come to finals with minimal prep and hopefully ace finals enough to get low As. (Best thing is that the finals were worth 60% of my whole grade!)