First 10 Days as a HS Senior
Aug 28, 2017 · 3 min read
It’s pretty wild and exhausting but also rewarding and challenging and liberating… I have had some pretty key revelations so far:
- Class is not a competition. It’s an environment for people to improve and learn and make mistakes and feel comfortable sharing their ideas. The people and academic culture at my school can definitely be intimidating; their brilliance, quickness, and depth of knowledge is really quite impressive. It can be crushing to one’s self-confidence and self-worth, as I know it was for me. Since I always identified as someone who was smart, being exposed to the whole world of intellect outside of my bubble, after moving from Hawaii, created a void in me where I previously sat, complacent. Without going too much into detail, I spent the majority of my high scchool career competing against my peers, trying to prove to them not only that I belonged in their academic circles, but could be distinguished. The stress that inevitably ensued made me insecure and it also hindered my process of learning — I was no longer focused on absorbing the material, I just wanted to defend myself. So as for how I changed this deep-seated mindset, it was a slow light switch. I think it was Girls Who Code that sparked it, and being around people of different backgrounds and realizing that everyone had unique contributions (we were inundated with “we need more women in tech!”) so I gradually started to shift my mindset away from the traditional view of ‘smart’. There are so many successful people in the world who don’t come from prestigious colleges but so incredibly interesting and inspiring because of what they have done. Making that growth for myself required me to acknowledge that even though I may not have the smartest contribution per se, I have the most unique contribution — no one else will have a perspective like I do. I am unique therefore I am important and add value to the conversation. Once I internalized that, I began to see that in others.
- Teachers are people. Like, interesting people. Think about it: you have 50 minutes to interact with someone who possibly has a Master’s, and therefore, an intense fucking passion for the subject that they are teaching. If you are interested in Economics or Calculus, there is literally someone 10 feet away from you that has studied that exact thing for most of their adult life and they are getting paid to convey that passion to you. Teachers are a free resource — use them: nerd out, share a cool idea that you have, critique one of their ideas, discuss, debate, and enjoy the mutual love for the subject.
- Everyone will be going on a different path. Literally people having been forging their identities now for almost 18 years and our paths are starting to diverge. As such, there is little purpose in comparing your own path to that of others because they are inherently different (of course they must be, we have spent our entire lives living different lives). What is so much more valuable is learning about their unique path and sharing insights so we can both be enriched by our diverse experiences.
- Have agency over the way you spend your time; don’t waste time on classes that you don’t enjoy.
Originally published at thelittleinfinityblog.wordpress.com on August 28, 2017.