“It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where
the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.”
—V. S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds
Going into high school, I held an idealistic view of the high school world, setting a roadmap for my courses and extracurriculars. Cleaning my room today, I found that paper with all my plans. Needless to say - they didn't happen. For each February when we picked our courses, I had a major dilemma between what I wanted to pick versus what I had planned, and also what my peers. Upon seeing this quote last week, I felt that it accurately represented my annual February class selection stress - the ideal view of what I had to be and what I had to select unraveled all of my fears.
Potentially this stems from my indecisiveness: confusion over what I want to do in the future and hope to appease others like my parents, counselors, and peers. Looking back at these last few Februarys that I don't have to go through this year, I'm pretty grateful for what happened. Though this is a pretty trivial matter of stress, it taught me that life's never going to be a straight path - nor will it always follow a plan exactly. Cliché, yes, but I'll have to admit that the trivial matter of stress at every scheduling card pained me and brought me to these reflections. I waffled between different combinations of class selections, ones for if I made color guard, ones for if I didn't, ones if I selected APUSH, ones if I selected AP Seminar... the list goes on. At the time, I really did think dealing with the unknown future (making the color guard team) was tough, but little did I know I'd be dealing with a global pandemic three years later! Anyways, my distress did result in a matter from my idealistic view of what my high school career should be like. With my many paths (course selection combinations), not only did my fears "unravel," but so did my available opportunities. Sometimes I hold regrets for not taking certain courses (most times, it's more of the class culture that I long for rather than the content - FOMO?) but I'm glad I took the risks I did, the detours from the "given", idealistic paths. In fact, I'm pretty proud of sticking through AP Capstone - normally others' feedback change my mind relatively fast, but the doubts for AP Capstone definitely didn't (shoutout to Sejal for sticking with me during these past two years <3). I had the opportunity to explore real-world topics, writing papers on artificial intelligence and productivity, environmental justice in Flint specifically, and the scientific perspective of both foster care and the measles vaccine. Then the next year, I culminated the Capstone curriculum with a research paper intertwining my favorite topics: marketing, technology, design, and the community.
If you have any underclassman friends, definitely let them look into this two-year course pathway! Following my last blog post "Truth Hurts," we make choices every day, but not all choices yield saddening truths. I think what's important is to take advantage of the choices offered to you daily, and consider if you want to take the leap of faith with the risk(s) present (kinda like opportunity costs for econ friends?). To put this concept in a different analogy more relevant to myself, my lesson learned is to not be afraid to try something new—how else would I have found my beloved Thick & Fluffy waffle?
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