Becoming a person

Editor’s Note: These are thoughts from high school that sat unpublished for two years, buried in my old notes. I recently stumbled across it and decided to share it as-is, with minimal edits.

From a meta perspective, I find my past writings valuable, as they're the only evidence of the socialization process I've experienced. Maybe some of these old thoughts still surface in how I act today. I might write more about this in the future.

1. Figure out how you want to get through life

You might have been drifting through elementary and middle school, relying on the personality that you were molded into by your genetics and your environment. But now it's time for you to be conscious of who are you and who you are becoming.

How do you want to get through life? Do you want to be confident, extroverted, and unstoppably agentic? Or do you want to be thoughtful, introverted, and very productive? (This is not a dichotomy.)

I made most of these choices, both small and big, good and bad, throughout high school. I chose to think that I'm good at math.¹ I chose to be bad with directions.² I chose to be optimistic about people and society.³ I also chose to be reclusive at lunch, to never join any large friend groups, and to only know a few people very well. More about this topic in The Stories We Tell Ourselves.

It's important for you to realize that people have very different views of themselves and the world, and that you can change who you are if you don't enjoy being who you are. Be deliberate about how you act, and be deliberate about who you will become.

Two excellent books about this are The Courage To Be Disliked and Barking Up The Wrong Tree. I only wish I read them sooner.

2. Figure out what you need, figure out who can help you get it, and ask them for it

In other words, talk to your teachers and upperclassmen.

Teachers are some of the funniest and most knowledgeable people you have around you every day. Plus they are basically predisposed to like you, a student, since their career of choice was teaching. And they love giving advice!

If I didn't spend more time around my teachers, I probably wouldn't have known that one of them dropped out of their PhD program in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon, one of them built a class lab experiment to measure the speed of light, and another did private tutoring for up to $100 per hour in the Washington D.C. area. And they also told me about their friends: one went on to work on the M1 chip at Apple, and before that he was working on missiles; another decided to go backpacking for a year right after graduating from college.

It's useful to know what people have done, in order for you to get a good idea of who you want to become. Unoptimal wrote a great essay about how meeting agentic people changed his outlook here.

The other side of this is that networking is just plain useful. One of my teachers offered me an opportunity to work designing a circular motion lab for the physics class during the summer. Another nominated—and helped me win—a hefty scholarship that I didn't even know about.

Upperclassmen can also serve as mentors. They have all the know-how about the school that you don't (yet). Especially prioritize finding upperclassmen that have similar interests and goals as you, since they are more likely to give you actually helpful advice about courses (see below), and they can help you advance into club officer roles and the like. Don't feel shy about this! From personal experience, we love adopting a gaggle of underclassmen.

3. Think about course selection carefully

This is the part of your high school experience that has the most loopholes. Here are some things I didn't know beforehand:

• You can skip PE if you demonstrate that you've reached an advanced level in a particular sport.
• You can transfer up to 2 course credits from another accredited institution as long as the course isn't offered at the high school. In my case, that means that I could have taken Mandarin as a foreign language.
• You can skip math course prerequisites through a placement exam.

This is just for my particular school, of course. These are things that aren't broadcasted to students at all (perhaps for good reason). My advice is to reach out to your upperclassmen, particularly those that seem very ambitious. You should also ask them about particular courses too.

One of my regrets is putting Guitar as my arts backup instead of Ceramics. I learned that I needed to be challenged in a class, and that too much unstructured time didn't really work for me. But I would have avoided that miserable fourth-period if only I had interrogated my friend Alex more thoroughly about the class.⁴

4. Try new things

Don't do things you dislike or feel indifferent about. To be clear, those are separate things. If you dislike hosting Zoom meetings, but you feel strongly about math education, I would urge you to power through the struggle. That's not the time to quit! A good sign that you care about that particular thing is that you have a bunch of ideas on how to do things better than the way they are being done now.

On the other hand, if you are spending a lot of time learning how to identify 105 fossils and 28 astronomical objects by their picture, and you realize that this is irrelevant to your goals, please don't be afraid to quit. Jealously guard the time you have, especially in your junior and senior year.

Perhaps one of my few regrets is completing a Google Data Science Certificate and a Python Application Programming community college course during the summer before senior year. I was terribly stressed about college applications at that time, so I did everything that was within my reach—including things that I did not enjoy. As it turns out, neither of those items made it on my application anyway. Don't be like me!

5. Get enough sleep

I know it's hard. This admonishment isn't meant to shame those of you who can't sleep, or simply don't have the time to sleep. But I promise, if it is within your control, you should prioritize sleep over socializing or phone-scrolling or even studying.

It might feel fun and daring to sleep in class, especially if all of your friends are as sleep-deprived as you are. But this is definitely going to prevent you from socializing with your teachers, and the burnout is definitely going to hit you someday too. The first day you'll feel an adrenaline rush, and that'll help you power through the day. The next day you are going to feel existential dread at the thought of going to school.