Prideful Work

Our Individual Oral Presentation from Junior year english is one of the assignments I by far the
most proud of. We had to create a presentation around ~10 minutes about one or two of the
books we had read that year. At the time I was enjoying learning about philosophy and its
different perspectives. Using the knowledge I had gained on my own, I tied the play of Hamlet to
a few of the different schools of philosophy I was particularly interested it. While it may not have
been exactly what the teacher was looking for, as I had little in terms of literary devices and
features, I was very passionate about the project and its content, which was a first for english.
While I ended up getting a score that reflected the fact that it was a bit off topic, I am still proud
of the presentation, and glad I was able to at one point connect and develop something I was
passionate about with one of my less favorite classes.

Growth
Continuing with the theme of not doing exactly what the teacher wants you to, I’m going to stray
a little bit from academic growth here. Looking at my transcript, it is difficult to find areas where I
have been doing better. In my freshman year I was straight A student, and that only quickly
declined my Sophomore, Junior, and Senior year. While maybe not academically, my social and
extracurricular growth has been extremely significant. Where I was once a somewhat antisocial
student who greatly disliked school spirit participation, sophomore year turned me into an
extreme extrovert who participated in every school event and more. Senior year has found me
in more of a balance, but I am still way more out there than I ever thought I would be. My
extracurricular growth has been mainly in climbing and robotics. I dedicated myself to climbing
and saw fantastic growth on the walls, becoming a capable and competitive climber. In robotics,
I was able to achieve my goal of 7 years and made it to the FTC World Championships. That
was a huge accomplishment, and allowed me to move on to a more advanced college level
competition called robosub.

Room for Improvement

As stated in the last paragraph, my academics have shown to have plenty of room for
improvement. Where my freshman year showed great potential, I became a less dedicated
student as soon as sophmore year came around. Perhaps had I continued to stay focused on
my academics and care about them more, I could’ve achieved academic greatness. My greatest
challenge was my battle with procrastination. As it became a bigger beast, my academic
success suffered more. It is a beast I continue to battle today, and as I journey into college I
hope to find my way to defeat it. With procrastination out of the way and my academic
motivation restored, I should be able to perform very well in college.

GOHS
GOHS has done a huge part in preparing me for college, particularly the IB program. The
program pushed me in areas that I was unfamiliar, equipped, and not proficient. These areas
are mainly my writing, literary, and historical knowledge. These are all areas where, as much as
I didn’t enjoy it, IB pushed me to be better and capable. With my next step being college, all this
work and preparation will surely make it easier for me to succeed. In areas I am more proficient
in, like math and comp sci, my classes have managed to make easy topics significantly difficult,
and push me to my limits. A good example is math. Where I had very little issue with math up
through sophomore year, HL math year two kicked my butt and made me work hard, stretching
my conceptual thinking to its maximum. In comp sci, HL has taken me from a decent coder to a
proficient one, and I was able to look back on some of my old projects and scoff at their
simplicity.