I decided to scroll around my old private blog on the Art of Problem Solving and only read through a single post from only a couple months ago before I realized how much I truly changed over my junior year. I would like to critique this post, just for fun, and see what I think now.
And chances are, I’ll be cringing at this post in senior year, too!
September 15th, 2023
I have completed my first week of school! It was quite a memorable experience greeting almost everyone I knew on the first day of school. Also, I did a Div. 3 Codeforces Round during lunch that day, and I will never forget my 4-problem streak submission before I couldn’t solve E (which turned out to be a simple XOR subarray query). Also, within a few days, my senior friends immediately got to business and started a new card game world championship, not too different from the Abject World Championship we held last year!
I still remember the first day of junior year, when I felt like I knew almost everyone I saw. It was such a great feeling seeing all of your buddies after a full summer break. I also do remember that Div. 3 and that I got stuck on Problem E, although I don’t remember which one. I also vaguely recall a world championship my close senior friends (who graduated this past week) played.
Overall, I think it’s natural to be excited about school on the first day or even the first week, but once the homework starts loading up, life is probably not as exciting.
I use my free time to thank God for all the blessings He has given me and the wisdom he gave me. Sometimes, this world has so many distractions that it can be very easy to get caught up with what people are doing around you and lose your loyalty to your goals, the people you care about, and the mission that God has given to you.
Thank God! He has definitely showed me what was possible through this year, especially in the most stressful and burdensome of times. I wouldn’t say I used all my “free time” to pray, but I did try to make it a consistent habit at the beginning of each school day.
Yes, this is a very embarrassing blog, and I myself feel quite uneasy writing this. But it’s one of my only ways to get my swirling thoughts into the concrete form of writing.
I agree that writing can help you clear up some emotions you’re having at school or work. It’s a good way to put down what you’re going through in words so that it won’t bother you a lot. However, I posit that it’s important to emphasize action over how you’re feeling, because at the end of the day, discipline carries you very far.
As introverted as I may seem, I sometimes feel like an outsider. I know many types of people: nerdy math/computer science geeks, built swimmers, prospective writers, emotional musicians, and so forth. When you really get to know me, we can have a great time together. But as I, unfortunately, noticed quite late into sophomore year, being cliquey and as Trevor Noah alludes, “chameleon-like”, may have its drawbacks. Even if you can eventually become a complete academic, athletic, and musical warrior, you can feel quite cut off from the world. You are focused, but at the same time, you genuinely want to hang out with someone who doesn’t share quite a commonality with you. [insert some math stuff???]
I see what I was trying to say. It’s important to focus on your goals and the person you want to become, and it’s especially important to build up strong social connections those that matter the most. But I would like to inquire: how exactly would you be cut off from the world if you are “chameleon-like“? This statement seems broad and uncertain to me.
Being friends is being friends… no one requires you to search for people who have at least one of your interests.
I had to read this sentence twice before I got what I tried to say. I agree – you don’t have to share a common interest with your friends to be friends. That’s a hard fact that I still struggle to accept.
Another observation, which I may write here before I get desperate, is the active social world that I’ve noticed revolving around junior year.
Humans are inherently gregarious creatures. That is a fact that we have to accept. But if you’re someone like me who needs to maintain extreme focus on goals or constantly strive for self-improvement, sometimes you need a less active social world than most people do. It doesn’t mean we should cut off connections – it means preserving the ones that matter to us and eliminating the ones that don’t.
I’m sure more people felt isolated in freshman year because of the new school and environment they had to accustom themselves to. But after that, you’ve basically got your friends. Rarely have I seen or heard of people making new friends in sophomore year or above (I blame this a lot on the Internet). If you’re the new student, it doesn’t get any better when people seem to welcome you but afterward leave you alone.
COVID exacerbated the social lives of many people. Many people before the pandemic had many friends, but after it couldn’t find the social spark they had seemed to have two years prior. For students including myself, when I came back to my school district after my temporary residence in Taiwan, I found out that many people in the Class of ’24 already had new friends. Many of them had a hard time recognizing me and some of them don’t remember me at all.
Life changes real quick, and especially due to the massive increase in social media use, people are becoming increasingly more forgetful than ever before, due to their shortened attention span. This was a big burden that only recently am I starting to get over with, especially because my best senior friends are moving into college.
Another factor is probably the competitive environment my high school. A lot of my peers seem to be in it for themselves, for college applications, and fame. Therefore, it’s hard to find people who can genuinely be kind to newcomers, especially those that won’t force an artificial “Hi” and move on with their lives as if nothing happened.
If I thought the sophomore year was enough of a socially harrowing experience, I wouldn’t have even dipped my toe this year if I hadn’t followed God closer this summer. Junior and senior years are almost the years of belonging; you hang out with your friends every day, and on many occasions, you go out for a good snack or lunch.
I don’t agree. Everyone makes it such that you got to “have friends” and “belong” in your upperclassmen years, because you’re older. However, whether you choose to follow the crowd or be different is up to you. Just because everyone acts a certain way doesn’t mean you should act that way.
The graph is closed, and the average sums of indegrees and outdegrees have increased. I have evidence of it everywhere.
What is a closed graph? The only definition I could find is the “closed graph theorem”, which was definitely not what I was implying here. The “graph” most likely refers both friendships and romantic relationships.
And boy, do I have much to write about that.
Guys start spam-adding girls on Snapchat, Instagram, etc., and the same way the other way around. I can tell from their Instagram follower counts: that people start farming followers, which in turn farms attention. Many, many people, are overwhelmed by their loss of sense of belonging by social media and infatuation with attention, lose their concentration on more important tasks such as standardized testing, school, and even goals of high proficiency in athletics.
Are they “overwhelmed” and do they “lose their concentration”? So be it, and that’s none of my business.
That being said, I still do have things to rant about here along the lines of social life, but I can expand on that in a later post.
Basically, I believe that social life in high school doesn’t matter as much as it does in college because you won’t meet most of the kids you see in your classes ever again after graduation. It’s a sad truth, but better to accept it earlier than later. Logically, it’s not that sad to not have friends in high school, because high school is a perfect time to hone your skills and prepare for the real world beyond.
And those guys spam-adding girls on social media… those guys are driven by emotion. Let them keep wasting their time until they realize they haven’t done anything meaningful in high school.
In addition, the edges start getting directed, if they aren’t haven’t already in sophomore year. People start getting into relationships and start dating. I surmise that it’s quite an interesting experience, but it seems like an incomprehensible world to me. It’s a trade-off: the popular kids don’t understand how square root problems may sometimes invoke trig subs, while the kid who struggles to see the intuition behind an expected value problem doesn’t understand relationships. But what’s harder: math or dating?
And romance… gee. I don’t like writing about this, but I think I should take a stance. Logically, high school is not the time to be getting a boyfriend or girlfriend. Do it in college – that sums it up.
Teens are pretty bad at controlling their emotions (it’s really funny how I’m not even an adult and I’m writing this). I’ve seen a lot of new pairs starting to date in junior year. But I’ve also seen at least one instance of a breakup, and trust me: even if I’ve never dated a girl before, I can imagine how much that hurts. I don’t want to get into that situation, and even the most romantic couples in high school have to part, since this hydra-headed monster named College stands in the way. (Unless it happens that both are going to the same college, but what are the chances of that happening? Would one really attend a college for the sake of a relationship? That’s a risky move.)
I think that trade-off is true. I still believe that math is harder.
I actually think math is harder because there’s so much more to learn, while with relationships you just need to understand graph theory. [insert math stuff part 2] Oh c’mon, I was expecting them to at least teach some of us some interesting tactics for simple graph construction problems, but they seem to be too focused on their multi-edges.
Time to explain this in math… or not.
Yes. These lines were mostly intended for humor effects, but unless you’re not a math hater, you wouldn’t find these lines funny.
How I will do it in the future, will be up to God. For now, I trust in Him to bless my academics.
Thank God for a great year of improvement and growth! I continue to pray for my goals next year as well as many incipient things I’m planning to start next year.
Moral of the story: don’t be a consumption cattle unless you really want to succumb to it.
Mhm. I couldn’t have said it better.