Un-numbered F — Reflection on Senior Year
This was inspired by an assignment for AP Lit last year, which was truly a valuable exercise, so I have repeated it for this year.
Dear Alan from August 2018:
If learning is defined by changes in behavior (as some of the figures from AP Psychology might have you believe), perhaps you haven’t necessarily learned much this year. Sure, you learn the surface-level things you might have expected to learn in school: vocab, grammar, and culture in Spanish; theories of human behavior, cognition, and development in AP Psychology; ecology and biochemistry in AP Biology; and so on and so forth. Your growth as a person seems to stagnate, however—perhaps this is a result of unsustainable growth between junior year and RSI, or perhaps it is simply a result of having found one’s identity. The question remains unanswered, although, with any luck, this hiatus in personal improvement will end this fall.
Despite this stagnation, senior year may just be your best year in terms of literal achievement in all sorts of activities. It turns out, for example, that your debate career did not peak freshman year—you begin to place in extemp, and you end up getting 4th at quals (which gets a spot at nats) and 3rd at state! Not only that, your policy legacy continues, as the ever-winnowing field gives you a graceful exit, as a quarterfinalist at state and 5th place at quals (although both result from some level of luck). In Orchestra, you end up leading the second violin section and receiving the Director’s Award at the end of the year (although your All-State chair does not improve at all). In Knowledge Bowl and Science Bowl, you place first yet again.
Perhaps the activity that surprises you the most, however, is robotics. You enjoyed robotics last year, but you fall head-over-heels in love with it this year. Perhaps it is just as much time as it was last year, but the moments spent with robotics friends both in and out of the lab (such as prom) are the ones you live for. The achievement-oriented part of you may be wondering how it goes—your job is much easier and much better done than it was last year (no further spoilers on the game itself), and, in conjunction with the skills of the rest of the team, you make it to worlds. (A little more on that later.)
The happiest moments of all of this year are all of these and more, serving as vindications of four years of hard-ish work in pursuit of (but never quite reaching) academic excellence. Getting into MIT, your dream of four or more years, as well as a smattering of the rest of the country’s most prestigious schools (ok, you get accepted to all but two schools—not telling you which); getting to be one of the counselors for RSI 2019, returning to help next year’s class be just as great as yours; getting to be a Presidential Scholar, culminating all of these factors—they all show that somehow all of these things you did worked out, yet they are perhaps far less important to you than you (or at least you from a year or two ago) might expect. What is important to you—and correctly so, I might add—is the friends you make and the people you meet along the way, and it is being a small, positive part of their lives that is perhaps your biggest dream.
All of this pomp and circumstance is not to say that it is all joy. Senior year is not a cakewalk. There are plenty of self-caused issues surrounding procrastination, especially around AP Bio in particular. You do much less than you expect to, from Regeneron to other scholarship applications. There are moments in the year where yet again you feel like dying, from when you first choose to return to policy debate, to when you get deferred from MIT Early Action, to the moment when you know that you are yet again head-over-heels in love with a straight boy, to the moment you know you’ve missed the AIME by a significant amount of points in your last year of high school. There are decisions which make your more anxious than the world can possibly handle, although, in retrospect, you end up choosing mostly correctly, attending Worlds over Science Bowl, MIT over Harvard. Hopefully, you know to expect that, but sometimes even when you expect pain it hurts just the same.
The future from here is uncertain, but all I can say to you, anxiety-ridden and hopeful, is that everything will work out. Perhaps the platitude is easier to say than to believe, but I truly mean it, both for senior year, and also in the future. Take life into your own hands and make the best of it.
Good luck, have fun, live life, love it all!
Alan Zhu
May 26th, 2019
Dear Alan from August 2018:
If learning is defined by changes in behavior (as some of the figures from AP Psychology might have you believe), perhaps you haven’t necessarily learned much this year. Sure, you learn the surface-level things you might have expected to learn in school: vocab, grammar, and culture in Spanish; theories of human behavior, cognition, and development in AP Psychology; ecology and biochemistry in AP Biology; and so on and so forth. Your growth as a person seems to stagnate, however—perhaps this is a result of unsustainable growth between junior year and RSI, or perhaps it is simply a result of having found one’s identity. The question remains unanswered, although, with any luck, this hiatus in personal improvement will end this fall.
Despite this stagnation, senior year may just be your best year in terms of literal achievement in all sorts of activities. It turns out, for example, that your debate career did not peak freshman year—you begin to place in extemp, and you end up getting 4th at quals (which gets a spot at nats) and 3rd at state! Not only that, your policy legacy continues, as the ever-winnowing field gives you a graceful exit, as a quarterfinalist at state and 5th place at quals (although both result from some level of luck). In Orchestra, you end up leading the second violin section and receiving the Director’s Award at the end of the year (although your All-State chair does not improve at all). In Knowledge Bowl and Science Bowl, you place first yet again.
Perhaps the activity that surprises you the most, however, is robotics. You enjoyed robotics last year, but you fall head-over-heels in love with it this year. Perhaps it is just as much time as it was last year, but the moments spent with robotics friends both in and out of the lab (such as prom) are the ones you live for. The achievement-oriented part of you may be wondering how it goes—your job is much easier and much better done than it was last year (no further spoilers on the game itself), and, in conjunction with the skills of the rest of the team, you make it to worlds. (A little more on that later.)
The happiest moments of all of this year are all of these and more, serving as vindications of four years of hard-ish work in pursuit of (but never quite reaching) academic excellence. Getting into MIT, your dream of four or more years, as well as a smattering of the rest of the country’s most prestigious schools (ok, you get accepted to all but two schools—not telling you which); getting to be one of the counselors for RSI 2019, returning to help next year’s class be just as great as yours; getting to be a Presidential Scholar, culminating all of these factors—they all show that somehow all of these things you did worked out, yet they are perhaps far less important to you than you (or at least you from a year or two ago) might expect. What is important to you—and correctly so, I might add—is the friends you make and the people you meet along the way, and it is being a small, positive part of their lives that is perhaps your biggest dream.
All of this pomp and circumstance is not to say that it is all joy. Senior year is not a cakewalk. There are plenty of self-caused issues surrounding procrastination, especially around AP Bio in particular. You do much less than you expect to, from Regeneron to other scholarship applications. There are moments in the year where yet again you feel like dying, from when you first choose to return to policy debate, to when you get deferred from MIT Early Action, to the moment when you know that you are yet again head-over-heels in love with a straight boy, to the moment you know you’ve missed the AIME by a significant amount of points in your last year of high school. There are decisions which make your more anxious than the world can possibly handle, although, in retrospect, you end up choosing mostly correctly, attending Worlds over Science Bowl, MIT over Harvard. Hopefully, you know to expect that, but sometimes even when you expect pain it hurts just the same.
The future from here is uncertain, but all I can say to you, anxiety-ridden and hopeful, is that everything will work out. Perhaps the platitude is easier to say than to believe, but I truly mean it, both for senior year, and also in the future. Take life into your own hands and make the best of it.
Good luck, have fun, live life, love it all!
Alan Zhu
May 26th, 2019
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