Four years ago my high school career started. It began with me walking into the wrong classroom. I remember sitting there for a good 15 minutes before realizing my mistake. It was truly embarrassing. Before freshman year, I had been thinking of my first day of high school, and I never expected something like that to happen.

I also wasn’t expecting to have huge seniors scream in our faces day one. At the time I thought it was so scary and strange, but this year–my senior year–on the first day, my friends and I screamed in many freshman’s faces.

Another highlight of my freshman year was joining the cross country team. I didn’t have much passion for running, but I decided to go for it anyway. I ended up hating it. Running 4 miles a day just wasn’t for me. However, I’m very glad I did it. The running part was terrible, but I had a lot of fun with the other members of the team. This leads me to my first big piece of advice: try everything.

High school is a great time to figure out more about what you want to do in life. The only way to do that is to put yourself out there and participate in many activities. Join some clubs, play a sport, take many types of classes. It’s extremely important to find your interests. Not only that, but filling up your day is much better than leaving it empty.

My freshman year, I was always doing something. After Covid hit, however, that lessened. My sophomore year was very difficult to participate in school activities. My junior year I put a lot of pressure on my grades. All I cared about was having a high GPA. I stacked my classes the year before, so I had a heavy workload. And because of this, I didn’t really do much outside of school. Every day I would go to school, go home and do homework. It was terrible. I got good grades, but I wasn’t having much fun. This cycle continued until the spring when baseball season started up again.

At first I was terrified about having less time to do schoolwork and I kept wondering if my grades would slip. It was a bit of an adjustment, but with good time management skills I was completely fine. I also started having a lot more fun each day. I think this story is a great example of how important getting involved during high school is. We all put so much pressure on ourselves academically that sometimes we forget that high school can and should be a lot of fun. Yes, it involves a lot of hard work and late night/ early morning study sessions, but with time management and balance you can have a great time as well.

My biggest regret is letting schoolwork be all I did. You never want to look back at a time period and think I could’ve done more. I look back at my time at high school and I have so many great memories, but I know that I could’ve had way more.