"What I wish I did in high school..."

Aman13
Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:28:59 +0000

1. ECs. Partially due to the fact that 90% of extra curricular activities offered at my school are buisness or “art clubs” that would bore me, partly my own decision that clubs were a waste of time, I only joined one club freshman year (and that ended up as a prime example of a club for slackers due to the nature of the president). As a senior who has finally started joining more clubs although way too late for it to impact my apps, I’d love to smack my former self and demand that I’d at least join a different initial club.

2. Get a social life. Due to a grade skip in middle school (and the honors courses that kept me away from what kids I did know), I had very little social life arguably up until the last 9 weeks last year (and not due to any extracurriculars or studys). I had opportunities to become more social, but I ignored all of them again thinking such chances were wastes of time. Heck, if it weren’t for my social life I would have never found clubs that interested me.

3. Choose a different middle school. I got two middle schools to choose between as I ended elementary school; one of which I had not heard a ton about and one of which I took 6th grade science at. I choose the later of the two. Fast foward through those years and it seems like the students who went to the other middle school were much more high school ready than my “never taught grammar or how to write an essay thanks to poor curriculum” self. The school was so bad that my GT coordinator reccomended that my brother and sister should go to the other middle school instead if the school was still open. This is STILL causing about most of my problems with college stuff; my relativly low English and History grades for the first two years of school (if a B is considered low) brought down my grade substantially, I’ve still never had a strong enough grammar base to truely excell at that section of the SAT (though the ACT’s varient gives me no troubles), and the grade skip forced me to take Algebra I and Geometry at the same time freshman year, putting me behind in elective credits and ultimatly limiting the number of APs I could feasibly fit in my schedule. But hey, hindsight is always 20/20.