Reflections and Images

It is not surprising that most students barely sleep because they have a heavy course load, do a lot of extracurricular activities along with other reasons. Unfortunately, most of them have this assumption that it isn't possible to even get 7-8 hours of sleep a day and think that "sleep is for the weak" when really sleep is essential to physical and mental health. Although this post may not make you get a good 8 hours of rest, it may help you to get extra minutes of sleep without   having to sacrifice your grades and activities. So let's get started! 1. Digital minimalism I cannot emphasize this point enough. Even if I am not an actual digital minimalist as I am still subject to distractions, trying to spend less time on your phone and computer is a lot helpful. You can see my previous articles on helpful extensions and programs on computers to block distracting websites. For my phone, the main reason why I don't spend much time on it is that I don't use soc...

Do you remember the times when you not only went through different stages of growth (an indirect way of saying puberty) and started to have different tastes in music, games, movies, etc.? In the beginning of middle school, I went with the flow by listening to what was popular and didn’t touch my classical music CDs anymore. Dust started to pile on top of them.  Then, I took a different turn the latter part of middle school and listened to some early 2000s bands such as The Fray and Lifehouse. Finally, I took a U-turn at the beginning of high school and gradually listened to more classical music instead of listening to mainstream songs.  At that time, I was familiar with classical music and played the piano. However, I never took my free time to listen to classical music for fun. I played classical music because that is what piano students play. It wasn’t until that my YouTube recommendations started to feature a few classical songs such as The Swan by Saint Saens or Morning b...

As a hardworking student that constantly strives for As, a weakness that comes with this trait is low self-esteem by not accepting the fact that I will keep making mistakes. These mistakes range from doing labs incorrectly to writing mediocre essays on tests. Despite using my reflection process (study like Darwin) after a test, lab, or assignment, I still make similar mistakes such as calculation mistakes or forgetting to do something. This repeated cycle of criticizing myself for not meeting my expectations has only made it harder for me because I feel obliged to always improve instead of falling down and then getting back up. Looking back on my previous failures, I realized that the best way to deal with them is to not make it very personal. One of the most important skills I developed from failure was seeing it as a temporary situation instead of an apocalyptic one. In other words, I wouldn't let my current situation determine my future. Instead, I would treat it like a postmort...

For those that are unfamiliar with Science Olympiad, Science Olympiad is like a decathlon. There are 23 events that cover all the natural sciences and there are 15 members on a team. The topics are very specific, such as genetics, acoustics, or optics. Some are study events while others include a building component. It has been my first active year doing Science Olympiad, and I can't say how much of a positive effect it has had on me. Even if Science Olympiad is a huge commitment and can be stressful, participating in 3 events (Sounds of Music, Protein Modeling, Fermi Questions) has not only made me know more about specific areas in science but also how to deal with failure and mistakes. Although I have dealt with quite a few failures in school, those were mostly tests and few related to long term projects. The failures I had to face in Science Olympiad were related to building projects, including building an instrument and creating a model for a protein. Here is what I learned fro...