Alright, it’s May 31st (the board for my school voted this year to chnage the end of the school year from June to the end of May) and I am officially done with 11th grade of high school. A lot has happened this year and I have decided to review and contemplate some of the things that I have done in this blog post.

School

This year I took three AP courses (AP Seminar, AP US History, AP Physics II) which is a decrease from last year when I took five AP courses (AP Language & Composition, AP European History, AP Computer Science, AP Physics I, AP Calculus BC). However, I have basically run out of math classes to take at the high school and instead opted to get early college credit by taking some college math courses this year (Calculus III and Linear Algebra). Overall, I feel that the AP courses and college credit courses that I took this year were not impossible and I did pretty decently in all of them when it came to grades.

I learned some cool new things in AP Physics II and enjoyed that class quite a bit. AP US History was okay because I already had some background knowledge on history - I did feel that the writing at times was rather dry but that’s just my personal experience. AP Seminar was also an interesting course to take as it was more project oriented and I was able to research some topics that I actually liked. The only issue was that at the beginning of the class I wasn’t particularly good at presenting (my teacher had us do some practice presentations with some basic research at the beginning of the year to get a feel for the class and I didn’t really practice my presentation beforehand leading to some rather scuffed presentations). However, learning from my mistakes, I got better at presenting by the time we did the official team research project and I had learned my lesson of needing to practice for presentations and on the day of the presentation, I actually did fairly decently and my teacher actually seemed to like what I did. A similar thing happened with the individual research project. Also, the class includes two essays with each presentation which went fairly okay for me.

Overall, the AP classes that took this year were fairly decent mostly because I liked the teachers. However, I still maintain that College Board itself still sucks as an organization (I refuse to be a corporate shill) for many reasons but that is a rant for another time (and something many other people have ranted about on the internet) so I will save it.

For the college classes I took, I found them to be quite interesting and I did pretty decently in them. Linear Algebra and Calculus III were both quite fun courses to take. Linear Algebra during second semester did conflict a little with AP Seminar and every other day I ended up having to show up late to AP Seminar which was unfortunate but things worked out in the end. Overall, college math was great and I intend on taking more courses during my senior year.

Extracirriculars

I don’t really do many extracirriculars at school in all due honesty. I usually am not able to find anything that particularly interests me and even when I do attempt some extracirriculars I end up feeling that I am not contributing anything of value and feel that it would be better for me to just leave. This happened with the robotics team this year - I felt I wasn’t very useful to the team and ended up quitting at the beginning of the year. However, I also felt that robotics also involved programming things that weren’t the most interesting to me. It’s unfortunate but I feel a little more free now - I don’t have to spend time working on code that ultimately is going to be thrown out in the end for reasons beyond my control and can instead focus on projects that I can learn from, have fun with, and actually show to the world in the end. Another thing I attempted this year was to join the Drama Club at my school and it turns out that I have basically no talent that can really be applied to theater. I can’t act for the life of me, I have no knowledge with sound and lighting, and I have mediocre art skills at best (that’s me being somewhat generous to myself). I guess I was vaguely helpful by helping clean up when needed and sometimes helping paint and build something but I felt that they could have been fine or better without me. I just stuck around because I wanted to give the illusion that I was something more than a talentless loser that is drifting through high school (though in all due honesty, I am a talentless loser that is drifting through high school). I gave up being helpful after a certain point and occasionally did some cleanup and when they didn’t need me I just sat around and did some math and thought about random ideas.

The one extracirricular that I actually did have some amount of success with was math team. I was able to do somewhat decently in the high school math competitions this year. However, our high school’s math team doesn’t administer the AMC tests (except for the AMC8 for middle schoolers) so I had to go through the high school to take the AMC12. The AMC12 went slightly less smoothly than anticipated due to the MAA testing website being horribly unresponsive. I did get a 97.5 (not the best score I could’ve gotten, considering I made a stupid mistake on one of the problems) but it was made up by the AIME where I got an 8 leading a USAMO index of 177.5. Not anything to scoff at in my opinion but I definitely did not qualify for the USAMO.

However, I still notice all my friends seem to be much more active than me - probably because they have more talents such as music, art, sports, and other stuff - which makes me question my high school experience so far and wonder if I really am being involved enough. At the same time though, I value my independence and quite frankly I feel some amount of pride in working on projects without the high school interfering or administering it, albeit it ends up resulting in nobody that I know caring about what I do. Additionally, there are times when I wonder if I really want anybody that I know in person outside of my very close friend group to see my projects. These are all questions that I probably don’t have answers to at the moment as my thoughts on them shift wildly with mood and personal events so I’m not really going to elaborate.

Personal Projects

I haven’t really done many personal projects this school year mainly because I was either busy or just lazy. I did make the game Scale The Tower and I also worked on some demos such as the OpenGL Infinite Terrain demo that I wrote some posts about on this blog and a wave function collapse demo that I’m actually quite proud of figuring out how to implement. I hopefully will make some more projects this summer - I have a list and I intend on going through that list and maybe I might write some blog posts about those projects as well. We will see.

That’s pretty much it for what I wanted to cover on my junior year of high school. Not exciting in my opinion. Anyway that’s it, have a nice day!