Today was the last day of high school for me (the graduation isn’t until about a week from this post but I am basically done with everything now). Quite frankly, it’s surreal that my routine for the past four years is now coming to an end and I’m going to have a very different life in a few months.

In previous post I said I was going to do a reflection/retrospective of my high school years so I figured that today would be an appropriate time.

So I suppose I should start at the beginning…

Freshman Year (2021 - 2022)

Freshman year was quite a long time ago but I feel one of the defining features was the fact that it was the year right after COVID-19 and I had just started high school after being stuck doing virtual school for half of 8th grade. Of course, having lacked significant social interaction for many months did not do great things for my social skills at the beginning of high school. I did not really have a strong friend group that I could just go to from middle school (I kind of had a friend group that I hung out with during lunch in 7th grade but I stopped spending time with them when the lockdown started and never really reconnected) so that made the first half of freshman year a little awkward. During lunch I mostly spent time with some upperclassmen that I knew but I felt I was never really integrated into their group. I did start meeting some new people and talking to others in my classes. However, despite an awkward start, I was able to meet the core friend group that I still spend time with today around the second half of the school year and I gradually spent more time with them at lunch until I was fairly integrated into their group. It should be noted that I also tried to spend time with other groups and I did integrate myself in another friend group but ultimately moved on from them. I suppose that shows the volatility of teen friendships.

Around this time was also when I really started to learn C++ and OpenGL which led to the creation of projects such as GeoDash 3D which I shared with my friends to get feedback. This would start the routine of me sharing projects that I had been working on with my friends which I still continue to this day in order to get feedback and also share my work.

Overall, I feel that the main defining features of my freshman year would be recovering from COVID-19, attempting to find my friend group and getting to know my other peers, and attempting to start/continue learning some of the skills that would later define my major interests.

Sophomore Year (2022 - 2023)

Sophomore year was a step up from freshman year. I only took one AP class in 9th grade (AP Statistics - which I believe is considered one of the more easy AP classes) but in 10th grade I took five AP classes (AP Language & Composition, AP European History, AP Physics I, AP Computer Science, and AP Calculus BC). This definitely created a more intense school experience and it also did not help that I was trying out a number of extracirricular activities to see what I liked or did not like. Additionally, towards the end of summer and the beginning of the school year some personal events came up (which I will not describe but I will say that said events were not good) that ended up making life more difficult and kind of hung over my head as they ended up greatly changing my life for a few months - usually for the worse. I definitely feel that these were stressful times.

It also did not help that I was still a rather negative/pessimistic person at the time which ended up making some social interactions more negative than I would like to admit.

I did continue learning things related to programming that I thought were interesting. I tried my hand at learning C which led to the creation of TerraTest - a Terraria clone made with C and OpenGL. I shared this project with my friends/classmates. I even shared it on YouTube, where I actually got a decent amount of views (by a “decent” amount I mean a few hundred at most but it was still rather good for a channel with only 20-something subscribers). In fact, one of my most popular videos was me doing a “post-mortem” of the process of creating the project, getting ~1.2k views (again, that’s relatively good for a channel with 20-something subscribers, but that 20-something number would balloon after posting that video, leading to some rather significant growth at the time). You can watch the video on YouTube. I would later find some criticisms of TerraTest but I still feel that this was a fun project that taught me a decent bit, even if I did make some significant mistakes in the process.

Afterwards, I would also learn some basic Lua and how to integrate it into a C program which led to the creation of Galaxy Invaders, which I’m still quite happy with to this day.

Fun fact: I think I started trying out Neovim in 9th grade but I really started getting comformtable with it in 10th grade and I still love it (I’m writing this post using Neovim right now!).

Anyway, I did get through my AP classes and ended up being successful on the AP tests, I got a 5 on every single one which I’m quite proud of. As for some of the new extracirriculars I tried out, I dropped out of two of the three after some time and the one that I stuck with - Robotics - I would drop out of later in Junior year. So I would say that that was less successful.

Despite the stressful events throughout the year, I did overcome them and do well in school while also having some fun - I tried to attend some of the social events that my high school held - albeit each one of them had varying degrees of “fun” for me and I wouldn’t really return to those events later.

I also grew closer with some of the upperclassmen (seniors and juniors at this point) but one consequence of that was that my social life would change in the following year when the seniors graduated

I would say the major themes of Sophomore year would be: hard classes, personal life challenges, trying out new things, and continuing to improve my programming skills with various projects.

Junior Year (2023 - 2024)

I already made a retrospective of Junior year so that already covers a decent amount of details but I will still provide my thoughts as of 2025 here in addition to that post.

I would say that reading that post, some parts do come off as overly negative - such as the part about Drama club. However, during Junior year I did drop out of Robotics and then attempt to experiment with being a part of Drama club to see what it was like in the later half of the year.

As for my social life, since some of the seniors that I was close with in the previous year had graduated I ended up being forced to get closer with some of the other peers that I knew (such as the previous year’s juniors at this point seniors) and of course, others my age. I definitely felt that my social life was broken up into two distinct parts in high school: the first half when I was rather awkward and ended up relying more on old relationships and the second half starting in Junior year when I had to end up relying on newer or make new relationships. I also would definitely say that I was a little more social with my peers this year and also attempted to be less negative.

As for programming projects, I shifted my focus back to C++ and I even started making some of my projects in Rust. I had started learning Rust in Sophomore year but I would say that around Junior year (and maybe in the summer prior) was when I started to be more comfortable with it and this led to the creation of Scale The Tower. I would later go back to C++ with the creation of my infworld demo and Flight & Fight.

Junior year was also when I started taking college math courses such as Calculus III and Linear Algebra.

Overall, I would say the major points of Junior year were: Attempting to relax some of the stresses of high school, opening up to others and strengthening my newer relationships, continuing some experiments with extracirriculars, and further expanding my programming knowledge, specifically with C++ and Rust, and adjusting to having to travel to a local college for math classes.

Fun fact: I created this blog when I was a Junior!

Senior Year (2024 - 2025)

Finally, we have arrived at the year that I just completed. I’m not quite sure what to feel about senior year but I definitely have some things to say about it.

The seniors that I knew in 2023 - 2024 graduated and unfortunately I lost contact with a decent number of them. This forced me once again to look towards either making new relationships and strengthening existing ones. I definitely would say that I got the pleasure of meeting a number of interesting people at my school, ranging from seniors that I never really talked to to some juniors and sophomores that I ended up being stuck in classes with. However, while I won’t give the details, there were some rather negative moments when it came to social interactions that I’m rather not proud of and there were definitely times in which I had some rather negative thoughts about the people around me, which I’m also rather not proud of. However, I would say that I had decent interactions overall.

As for classes, I took AP Chemistry, AP Research, AP Microeconomics, and AP Macroeconomics. I could not fit the economics classes in my schedule so I ended up taking them online - which if you read my time capsule you know that I do not have good memories of online school. I had some concerns that I would not do well in a virtual environment for an AP class but in the end it proved to turn out fine, with me gettng an A in both of the classes. As for AP Chemistry, despite never taking a chemistry class before, I ended up doing fine and I felt I was able to adapt well. As for AP Research, while at times it felt overwhelming I got scared I would not be able to meet the deadlines, I ended up pulling through at the end. I’m not sure how I did on the AP tests (or the paper/presentation for AP Research) but I guess I’ll see when the scores are released. I also took some elective classes that weren’t particularly difficult but were definitely new compared to what classes I had previously taken.

Once again, I took some college math courses - this time being Fundamentals of Mathematics (essentially a writing course on how to write mathematical proofs) and Real Analysis. I had kind of a rough start to learning how to write formal and rigorous proofs but I was able to adjust and do well in both courses. Overall, I found both of them to be rather interesting and I hope to continue taking interesting and challenging math courses in college.

As for extracirriculars, I didn’t really experiment at all, I mostly just ended up dropping the remaining ones I had. I stopped going to Drama club at the end of the year and also dissolved the Game Development Club towards the end of the year as well since I ended up not doing anything particularly interesting. There was also a lack of interest and most of the members were graduating as well. Maybe someone else will restart Game Dev Club next year or it will end up fading into obscurity. I also took the AMC12 this year again (despite running into some difficulties with the school having some funding cuts or something - it was kind of annoying to get it running again this year). I got a 114/150 - the best I’ve ever done (technically tied with a 114 I got on the AMC10 when I was in 8th grade but I would consider a 114 on the AMC12 to be better than a 114 on the AMC10). Unfortunately on the AIME I made a really stupid mistake on one of the questions and got a 7/15 which means that I peaked in Junior year with the AIME with a score of 8/15 then. However, my senior USAMO index was 184, the best I’ve ever gotten (beating Junior year’s 177.5), but of course, that is nowhere near enough to qualify for the USAMO. That means that I never was able to qualify for the USAMO (and never will) but that’s just how things are I suppose.

For programming projects, I did shift some of my focus to writing some of projects using Rust such as Astrocards and Voxelworld. I also wrote Flight & Fight using C++ but that was more of a summer project that I released at the very beginning of the school year.

Overall, the major themes of Senior year would be: once again making new relationships and strengthening relationships, contracting my extracirricular activity into doing things that I really found interesting/making time for out of school activities that I like (such as game development and programming), working on some larger and more ambitious projects such as Flight & Fight and Voxelworld and learning a lot from both of those projects, and just a sense finality.

Conclusion

So yeah, High school is done for me. What’s next is the great unknown. I’m not sure where I’ll be in 4 years but I hope it’s somewhere nice.

High school wasn’t perfect, I had some high moments but a lot of low moments as well. I’m not sure what to make of it. There were stressful moments, relaxing moments, moments when I was extremely proud of myself, and moments when I was utterly ashamed. I had positive interactions with teachers and classmates, and negative interactions with teachers and classmates. I wonder if I’ll forget the nasty stuff as the years drag on and have a false sense of nostalgia. Hopefully this blog post still exists then to give me the actual facts and reality.

Also, another thing to note was that throughout high school I was either constantly growing relationships, making new friends, meeting new people, and having to deal with people leaving me (usually through graduation). That just seems to be a theme that connects all four years. I’ll likely have the same experience in university as well.

Change is scary. But it’s also a part of life and I just need to adapt to it. It is difficult, but it is possible to overcome the bad stuff and get a lot of good stuff as well.

To quote Anne Boonchuy of Amphibia: “Change can be difficult, but it’s how we grow. It can be the hardest thing to realize you can’t hold onto something forever. Sometimes, you have to let it go. But of the things you let go, you’d be surprised what makes it’s way back to you.”

I wonder what’s next.