VOLUME 31, ISSUE 3 SUMMER 2022 PAGE 3
Advice How to Survive High School Due to a lack of serious questions, we decided to have our team give their own unsolicited advice! In this issue, two of our advice columnists unearth the ups and downs of their high school experience to help you make it through this strange time in our lives. However, this new section doesn’t mean that we won’t be answering advice prompts anymore. If you have any questions you’d like to ask our columnists next issue, submit them via our advice box in the library or the form on our Instagram: @gfss.talontimes—link in bio!
Response 1: Let’s get this out of the way, high school is both incredibly difficult and fulfilling. In lieu of this, it’s vital to be smart with how you go about things. The most important piece of advice is to manage your time, taking who you are as a person and what you can do into consideration. If you know that you’re a slow typer and you have an English essay coming up, or that your strongest subject isn’t the one you’re studying for, give yourself more time — it could be a week of studying or starting an assignment early. Often, you will find yourself putting out work that isn’t what you are proud of or straining yourself because of work piling up. When you understand your habits, you’ll be able to space out your workload and get a healthy amount of sleep. Now, you can take what you know and add on to make it holistically sound. This can be done by having an agenda (either online or a physical one) or setting reminders on your phone throughout the day for when you need to start working on a subject. High school is brutal because of its fluctuations — sometimes, you might get a bunch of work due around the same time, and sometimes, you’ll get a free week. Things can get overwhelming, so knowing what you have available to you is very important. Never be afraid to reach out to your teachers, and especially your guidance counselors — they’ll always be there as a second opinion or an outlet to talk to. Surviving is easy to do, but it’s ideal to be in a good position rather than the contrary. I hope this has been helpful! Regards, Tenzin Ghaki
Response 2: If I could have a conversation with my younger self, I would tell her that her plans for the future will change over time and that she should aim to always remain open-minded. Going into high school, I thought that I had a very clear and definite plan for what I would be doing after graduation. This affected the attitude that I held towards certain school subjects and the amount of effort that I put into them. When rethinking my decision in Grade 12 about which university programs to pursue, I felt that there were some that were automatically out of the running as I had not taken the time to properly learn the material in their prerequisite high school classes. Because of the mindset with which I approached certain subjects, I also overlooked how interesting some of the topics and assignments actually were. Another piece of advice that I would give my younger self is to join the clubs that are appealing to her in Grade 9 or 10 rather than waiting until later. Although better late than never, I feel that I would have gotten a lot more out of the school groups that I eventually became a part of if I had been involved in them from earlier on. Having more time to become familiar with the clubs’ structure and organization might have helped me to make a greater impact through the work that I did and hold more executive positions. As a result, I believe that I would have come out of high school with stronger leadership skills and had more to write about on university and scholarship applications. There is, of course, also the regret of not having joined certain clubs at all. Overall, these are two of the main things that I would tell other highschoolers: Stay open-minded and don’t procrastinate on getting involved. Regards, Victoria Gotcheva
