End of the Year Reflection

My second year of high school has certainly been an enlightening and eventful experience. Throughout the school year, I have learned many lessons that I believe will affect me for the rest of my school years, and possibly my life.

One important lesson that I take away from this school year is that of time management. Prior to this year, I had never had difficulty with completing any amount of work presented to me. In fact, I had always been the kid with too much time on his hands that seemed to be able to do anything. This year, however, for the first time, the total work from all of my classes often seemed massive to handle. It often wasn’t the difficulty of the work at all – it was just the sheer amount. As my workload piled up, I came to appreciate the value of time. The realization that time was one of the most important things in the world actually arrived to me in a strange way. This year, I studied AP Microeconomics independently. While I was reading my textbook, Principles of Microeconomics by Gregory Mankiw, one of the first principles that I came across was a concept called opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of something is the total amount that you give up to obtain it. The book listed college as an example – its opportunity cost consisted of some obvious elements: tuition fees, room and board, materials, etc. However, Mankiw wrote that the biggest portion of the opportunity cost of college came from the four or more years of one’s life spent there. His defense of his own statement was impossible to argue with – the things that one human being can achieve in four years are almost infinite. The more I thought about this property, the more I started applying it to my own life. I started to read or do homework on the half-hour bus rides to and from school, and even ran back to my house from my bus stop in order to save time. I’m glad I learned this lesson early in the school year, because as my classes progressed, and some of my other classmates began to fall behind on work, I realized that I had developed the good habit of saving little bits of time that eventually added up. Now, one must realize that there is a huge difference between idleness and relaxation. For example, I never felt bad taking a few hours off on a day where I had free time to hang out with my friends and enjoy each other, and the moment. Idleness is where you have nothing to do, and nothing that you want to do – and it was these moments that I tried to eliminate from my life throughout the school year.

Even though my time management skills seemed to improve as the year progressed, I still found myself facing another difficulty – that of sleep deprivation. Unfortunately, I have not been able to solve this problem yet (I think that if I could, I would be a hero to millions of high-schoolers across the country), so all I can do is offer advice on how to deal with it. First off, one should not expect to get eight or even seven hours of sleep a night. I find setting a certain amount of sleep to arrive at every single night is absurd and often impossible, except for the most organized of people. For the rest of us, it is beneficial to simply appreciate and try to maximize whatever amount of sleep we get every night. Distractions like the phone and the iPod in bed steal sleep like nothing else. I have also learned that the snooze button is my enemy. Those ten minutes of tentative sleep after the alarm sounds for the first time are comparable to one’s ten last minutes on earth. It is better to just force yourself out of bed ten minutes later and not have to face that limbo period. Finally, sleeping on the bus right before school, or even during class, is a bad idea. While the thought of resting your eyes even for just a few minutes might be enticing, that groggy, lingering feeling that you experience when waking up from a nap is simply not worth it.

This year has certainly presented its challenges to me, but I’ve also made some great progress. I had left last year feeling academically defeated. I took the American Math Competition (AMC) 10 in February, and didn’t make it to the next round. Then, in June, I also learned that I didn’t make the Columbia Science Honors Program. I had known that both would be extremely hard to make, but it still came as a shock to me that I hadn’t gotten into either. Before entering high school, I had never really measured myself against the other bright students across the country. I had done very well in the county and state-wide competitions (perhaps in part due to luck), but outside of Connecticut, I didn’t have an idea of how smart other students were. Even after taking the AMC 10 and Columbia SHP entrance exam, I still hadn’t gotten a gauge of how far off I was from my peers. All I could do was try and improve myself, and see if I had done enough this year. I set aside a couple hours every day last summer, and even on weekends during the school year, to study math and science. At times, it seemed like I was getting nowhere; none of the competition-based material was relevant in my classes, and I still would have no idea of how I was progressing until the competitions themselves. However, with a little encouragement from my dad, I kept at it for the entire year. When the time came this February for the AMC 10 test, it was markedly easier for me; I now knew how to approach most of the problems, and had the background knowledge to unravel them further. I ended up making the next round, the American Invitational Mathematics Examination, where the top 2.5% of scorers on the AMC 10 are administered a second test. I had even tried the AMC 12 in preparation for my junior year, just to test the waters. Surprisingly, I scored in the top 5% of AMC 12 takers, and was invited to the AIME again. The same thing happened for the Columbia SHP entrance exam – all of my hard work seemed to come to fruition. This year, I was accepted into the program, and I look forward to learning from Columbia University professors next year.

Overall, this has been an amazingly productive year for me. Next year, I hope to repeat or even magnify this progress by applying some of the lessons that I learned this year – that time is of the essence, and that hard work pays off.