Post-High School Education Is Important To Me: Fill & Download for Free

Idk if I can do 20, but as a senior in high school, this is my advice:If a senior tells you they love you, they’re probably just trying to take advantage of youDon’t cheat. It’s obvious, and it ruins the rest of your career.Don’t get in petty fights with other people. Drama is stupidCollege is sooner than you think. Don’t stress over it, but start thinking about your passions.DO! VOLUNTEER! WORK! If i could go back and tell myself one thing, it would be this. If you volunteer at the same place CONSISTENTLY it will show how passionate you are. Do it. Start now and stick with it.Join clubs now and stick with them. Invest your time in them, and earn leadership positions.Do all your math homework. Really you should do all your homework, but reeeaaalllyyyy do your math homework.Don’t subtweet people. Or post about people on your finsta.Don’t talk about people badly behind their back because they will ALWAYS find out. And that is a horrible position to be in.Ask your friends how they’re doing. And listen. This is a very important time in your life, and everyones going through a lot. It’s impossible to know whats happening in someone elses life, so just make sure they know you care. This is so important. Make sure your friends are healthy and safe.Make sure you don’t spend all your time studying. Hang out with friends and make memories. The next four years will be some of the most memorable in your life.Make a diary and write in it every day. Put pictures in it. Movie tickets. Little notes you’ve gotten from your friends. Trust me, you’ll want to look through it.

Travels back in time. Peeps into his highschool life.Damn, what the hell was I even doing ? Was that even real learning ? Chanakya would've let a truck run over him, instead of sitting in highschool with me.Comes back to reality. Let's rant.Beauty of poetry. Seriously, what was even going on in my mind when I was rote learning all those legendary poems ? I didn't realise how amazing a sonnet could be, until four years ago. I didn't have the faintest idea about what would've been in the poet's mind when he had been busy penning down those exceptional soul touching words. I regret not appreciating poetry back then. A poem was just a 6 or 8 marks question. Sigh.It matters not how strait the gate,How charged with punishments the scroll,I am the master of my fate.I am the captain of my soul.Simply epic.Basic finance and banking. Visiting a bank was my worst nightmare in those days. All that crowd, people shouting at each other, money everywhere, files, papers and crap gave me a nauseatic feeling. Truth be told, I wasn't ready to fill up a cheque or a deposit challan until the age of 20, forget to develop a habit of saving. Two years after college, I curse myself for not batting an eye all these years. Had they broken the mystery behind the art of investment and saving money, I would've been grateful now.Art of programming. Let's just accept it. Programming is awesome only if you've been taught well. Making machines obey our commands, man that's actually cool. Since most of us have been ignorant, or haven't been exposed to it, it's just one of those boring subjects that don't make sense whatsoever and you end up hating it for the rest of your lifetime. I hate programming, only because I fear it.Speed maths. This will surely take you a long way in life. Be it your school exams, or your college placements or any government exams for that sake, being a pro in speed maths is like a superpower. Yes, some schools do teach abacus and vedic maths, but most of them just throw this idea in the bin and move on.The importance of politics and parliament. Don't tell me you enjoyed your civics class back then. It was pure boring shit the way they taught it. If India needs more young leaders, then it's high time we started nurturing then from highschool. Oh, every friggin year, that subject started with the same line - India is a vast country. Nope, still hasn't changed.The other guys. Look around Quora. You can see crazy teenagers with questions on suicide, heart breaks and renouncing life already. Seriously, how messed up are they on the inside ? Someone has to teach them how to get their shit together and walk with peace. I wanted to come up with a title, but heck, why bother ? You got my point, didn't you ?Sex . How many of you learnt your basic life skills through the internet huh ? Be honest, else I'll come and poke your eyes for lying. Every bloody teenager deserves to know this and man, I hate our system for denying us this basic education. Things are changing these days, and I'm glad about it.Hoping for a better future.Hi ! Hope we meet again under my next post. Until then..Sayonara!

This answer is probably only useful for American high school students. It's my impression that high schools (or high school equivalents) in other countries are alternately worse/better in qualitatively different ways such that these wouldn't be as useful. This is also derived from my own experience (i.e. only a single data point) and speaks to things that I did and/or things that I feel I should have done, and which of those things were worthwhile and which were a waste of time. It's also more or less targeted at the intellectual/nerdy types that seem to be more likely to frequent Quora, haha.Here are some things that may appear important at the time but really aren't:1) GPA and other academic achievements are not very important in and of themselves. You should think of these as symptoms or side-effects of other, more important things you should be doing. But attaining a certain GPA or particular academic award is absolutely the wrong goal and will get you nowhere in life. You heard me right: getting a 4.0+ GPA in high school is not going to help you in life. Moreover, pretty much every award or accolade you achieve in high school is utterly useless and completely uninteresting to anyone post-high school. Think about that. At best, it will be a curiosity to be brought up in casual conversation or maybe something people will make fun of you for. I say this as someone with a bedroom back home filled with random awards won during high school. It's okay to win them if the activity you're doing is fun or fulfilling on its own merits, but don't let the award be the target.2) In general, high school isn't worth very much in terms of lifetime educational value. I say this as someone who went to a (supposedly) "good" public high school. After exiting high school and going to college (and then entering the post-college working world), I was flabbergasted at all the simplistic, partially-true, or outright false ideas I had been taught or otherwise exposed to during my high school years. Except for maybe mathematics, it's almost all superseded by much more advanced and complete theories (the hard sciences), more thorough and in-depth understanding (literature), and more complex and variegated truths (social sciences). You honestly aren't learning that much. Get ready to have your mind blown after you graduate.3) Do not bother trying to achieve perfect attendance. Don't skip school habitually, but if your school offers some kind of incentive for perfect attendance, it is totally worthless.What should you be doing instead?1) Your GPA and academic achievements are a sort of proxy for how well you can learn the stuff you've been exposed to, and to some degree, how motivated of a person you are. College admissions boards care about that, but it is mostly to tell them how well you're going to do at the school. Assuming you are looking to go to college (an increasingly less cost-effective thing to do nowadays in the US...), you need to do well enough to go to the school you want. That's all. The rest of the time, you should just try to learn what you can in and out of class, but do not expend extra energy trying to get those last few GPA basis points. Instead...2) You need to learn to socialize. My impression of high school social life in America is that it's kind of vapid and stupid (it was when I was there). Nevertheless, you should be taking this time in your life to go hang out with other people and learn to date. It turns out that later success in the world is very, very heavily predicated on how good your social skills are, and you don't learn those from a class or a book. Trust me, you're not. You're definitely not learning them from Quora. You learn it from spending time with people, doing awkward social things, failing, having stupid crushes and relationships and heartbreak, and if you're not already the most popular kid in school, you need to start spending time doing all that stuff now. Yes, you should do your homework, but after you get it done, get out of the house and go out with friends. All of that useless "socializing" is actually key practice for developing social skills - which later in life are called "business skills." (There, doesn't that make it sound more useful?) Do your best to leave your insecurities behind and learn to be cool. This goes double if you are a huge nerd. You can be a cool nerd. Just get out there.3) Engage in athletics. It turns out that physical health is really important. However, based on physiology, it doesn't become a quality of life factor for most people until their mid/late-twenties so if you don't exercise, you can still get by (i.e. you won't get fat while you're in your teens and early twenties). But it turns out that it takes a few years of diligent exercise and/or athletics to condition your body into generally healthy function, so if you have been exercising or playing sports for years, you are years ahead of anyone who starts later. If you believe that the gnostic and intellectual is all that's important, you're wrong. The mind-body duality is false, the keen functioning of your mind is enhanced by vigorous and regular exercise. I did not know this when I was young, and it's only in the recent years as the intellectual demands of my career continued to rise that I realized that I needed to target high levels of physical health in order to boost and maintain peak mental functioning. If you're not already doing so, take up a sport or join a team now in high school. It will not only affect your academic achievement; it will probably enhance it. Also, it will likely help with #2.4) The key things you should be working to build are motivation and willpower. This is because the other things you're being run through (e.g. academics) aren't actually true - or they are, at best, partially true. What you're doing is preparing for life after high school, where persistence and the ability to work hard are worth more than anything else. These things are built by repeated application, so just try to repeatedly do things that are hard for you, like work on really large projects, take on a sport where performance is difficult, learn a skill outside of school, etc.5) Don't compete, create. This one is a key mindset thing for your whole life. The American school system (and much of work life) is designed to place you into zero-sum situations where you're competing against other people for limited amounts of resources or recognition. You're often competing to see who's the best, and there can only be one (or a few) of the best, and that person (or people) get the pass to move on to the next level, where the process repeats. It's a tremendous waste of resources. There are other ways to live life and - arguably - be much more successful and productive doing it, which is to carve out new areas of expertise and productive activity through creative endeavor. This is why I say that GPA and academics achievements (especially competitive ones) are not as worth it. You should try to learn and create new things. This is different things to different people, but you need to explore and find out what it means to you now. The difference is that if you're competing, you might have two (or n) people competing, each one expending, say, 100, 99, or 98 units of energy, and the person who expended 100 units of energy wins the whole prize, and the 99 + 98 units of energy from the other two participants have been completely wasted. Instead, if all those people worked on their own thing, expending 100, 99, and 98 units of energy, it could have all been worthwhile and invested into whatever they happened to create. Schools - especially high schools - do a terrible job of this latter thing, so watch out for it. Make sure your effort will still count even if you do not win, because later in life you will frequently not win, and you cannot afford to waste your energy.-----The biggest, and most overarching thing to keep in mind is that you are, basically, in a larval stage right now. Thus, the most important thing right now is to marshal your resources in preparation for future growth and opportunities. None of the "goals" at this stage in your life are real life goals that matter. Even e.g. getting into the right college is not a key goal - if you fail to do that, you will still do absolutely fine if you have prepared yourself adequately for adult life. Make sure your focus your energies on building yourself up and not the temporary, intermediate goals that have been set in front of you.