my biggest high school regrets ✨ & what I don't regret!

hey guys today's video is going to be all about my top five regrets from high school so that hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and not have to learn them the hard way like I did and then after that I'll be going over five things that I'm glad I did that I don't regret during my four years in high school I guess I technically went through three and a half years in high school because my second semester senior year has been by the way this video is sponsored by the College Board opportunity scholarships which I will talk about later on in the video this video is going to be pretty chilling me just sitting here talking to you but I'll try to figure out I would work in an animation of a hamster drawing somewhere [Music] coming in at number five on the regrets list is putting off having fun until later I go to a high school that's pretty competitive almost everybody goes on to higher education in some form whether that be Community College four-year college or a trade school and as a result we're all pretty future-oriented the culture is very focused on doing well getting the grades in high school so that you can get into a good school and be successful in the future and obviously there's nothing wrong with getting good grades and wanting to succeed and being ambitious that's something that I would definitely encourage you to do but once it crosses a certain threshold it goes from plan ahead and do things now that your future self will be happy for - you have to grind and suffer for three and a half years in order to be able to finally relax once college apps are no longer hanging over your head there's a certain line between work hard now to make your future self grateful without absolutely wrecking yourself and working way too hard right now and putting yourself through misery just for some of that hope that maybe future self will be happier with the work that you put in but that's really not a healthy way to live life as I've come to realize because life isn't to be enjoyed while you're living it don't live every day like it's your last because that's a horrible like idea for your financial and physical health but you do have to take at least a little bit of time out of your weeks and months to just enjoy living I definitely did fall victim to just working and not making myself take time off to just have fun obviously I'm not saying I never ever enjoyed my high school experience but I did a lot of putting off things that I might have enjoyed and skipping out on spontaneous opportunities or hanging out with friends and now well I kind of regret that especially because I literally cannot do those things now even if you're not in this particular situation being a senior right now it's helpful to remember that having fun with your friends in high school it's not something will lasts forever and you should take advantage of it while you can instead of putting way too much time and focus on extracurriculars [Music] regret number four is not doing enough research about colleges before actually applying and you know trying to decide where I'm going to spend the next four years of my life and get my education and all that stuff my main problem with doing research was that I was so indecisive that I kept putting it off and putting it off and I just never ended up with enough time to properly formulate my list in a fully thought-out manner like I thought about it I really did but I didn't give myself enough time to fully think it through I pretty much formed my entire college list in like June before my senior year which is definitely not enough time like start like second semester junior year if you are an over-thinker and perfectionist like me indecision is so so paralyzing and I began to use it as an excuse for not taking action like oh I don't know what I want to major in so obviously I can't do the kind of research that depends on the ranking of a school within a field but like even if you don't know like I'm going to study this exact major at this exact location and then go into this exact field but in the end it's really better to just like try to get moving a little bit I definitely should have tried to approximate what I wanted and given it my best shot instead of just being like OOP well I don't know so I guess I just won't answer this question like if you don't know the answer on a test you might as well guess right and I like 50% new and answers so I should have just guessed the odds are in my favor anyways all of that in decision just resulted in me spending way too little time formulating my college list and definitely not doing enough research on each individual school I don't regret all the schools I applied to but there are a few schools that I wish I hadn't applied to because I wasted way too much application fees and time spent writing essays and self-esteem lost from reading rejection letters for schools that I didn't really care that much about in the end and conversely there are a couple of schools out there that I finally heard about and researched a little bit after I had already submitted all of my applications and the deadlines were over and then my brain was like oh maybe that'll be a good option based on what you know about yourself right now finally in the end I think it all turned out okay because I'm going to attend a school that I really like and I'm really excited about ten out of ten what apply again but maybe I could have saved myself some money and energy while I was on my way here my immigrant number three is not applying to scholarships I was just really lazy I don't really have a good excuse for it for example I really wish I had applied to the UCLA alumni scholarship it really didn't take that much effort it was like two essays and I could have just recycled one of my supplemental essays from another college application but I just rationalized it in my head because I thought I wasn't kind of getting to UCLA anyway so what was the point but really it wouldn't have been that hard there are so many opportunities out there that could have helped me wanna save some money on my college education and to maybe win some honors and awards and like prestigious things I guess I don't really know I probably should and I wish I did know more about this stuff but at that point after I had finished all of my college essays and put in all this work in applications and schoolwork I was just getting kind of tired and lazy but it would have done me well to realize that one scholarship applications don't actually take that much effort you just send in your scores and GPA and transcript and all that stuff and then I could just recycle a bunch of my supplemental essays from other college applications so if you are an underclassmen or a junior and you haven't gone through this process yeah I definitely recommend you at least shoot your shot at a couple of scholarships you never know what's gonna happen and it really does not take that much effort now speaking of scholarships today's video is sponsored by the College Board opportunity scholarships which is actually a series of six different micro scholarships that incentivize you to take certain steps along your journey to applying for college the six steps are pretty much things that you'll already be doing anyways so you might as well participate in a little scholarship winning action while you're at it the way this works is once you complete each step and track down in your College Board account you get an entry into each months prize drawing there's a separate drawing for every single step and then once you've finished all six of them there's a last one that's worth the most for you know people who have finished all six steps the opportunity scholarship system Awards about 4,000 students with a total of five million dollars in scholarships which range an amount from five hundred dollars to forty thousand dollars now this is open to everyone regardless of your family in a calm and I really appreciate that in this scholarship system half of the scholarships which amounts to around two million dollars he is reserved for people whose family income is less than sixty thousand dollars you know that way it helps to ensure that people who need it the most will get the best benefit out of the scholarship money if this sounds like something you'd be interested in it's very easy to get started right from the safety and comfort of your own home you can visit the link in the description for more information and the first step is to start with step number one creating your college List and this will enter you into the first drawing for $500 I mentioned earlier that I kind of put off a lot of scholarship applications because they required a marginal amount of extra work and this one basically doesn't take any extra work besides signing up for it this just incentivizes a bunch of different steps that I had already done in my process to apply for college and that most people will be doing as well if you're interested in this program be sure to check out the link in the description all right and now let's continue [Music] my great number two is not taking AP lang to me that class in particular it just represents the issues I had with being afraid to challenge myself so I wish I had taken that class and I also wish I had challenged myself a little bit more throughout my high school experience I think in sophomore year I definitely did that I took the hardest course that available at my high school for sophomores and I struggled quite a bit at the beginning of the year but I grew a lot through it the same happened when I challenged myself with joining long-distance running in sophomore year and I struggled and then I got through it but after sophomore year I got scared of the struggle for some reason even though looking back I have always been able to rise to the challenge or at least get through it and learn from my mistakes and besides taking hard classes and trying new extracurriculars I also wish I had just entered into more pursuits that I thought I'd probably fail at whether that be applying for a scholarship or award that I think I have no business winning or applying for an internship or summer research program camp thing that I was certain I'd be rejected from I wish I hadn't done so much oh I'll only do this thing if I'm sure I'll succeed at it and more I don't think I can succeed at that but maybe I'll stretch myself and see where it ends up going on one hand it's good to only expose yourself to a healthy level of challenge I don't dive in way too deep into something you're not ready for coz you'll probably drown but on the other hand I was definitely not challenging myself enough at all I just don't like that feeling that I had stagnated quite a bit in the middle of my high school years and now I'm working to push through it and I'll definitely be putting myself in challenging situations in college [Music] my number-one regret is a pretty big one that I feel like over arch to my entire series of regrets that I just discussed and that is that I wish I hadn't over committed and then burned myself out now nothing I didn't enjoy everything that I got myself involved in academically and outside of class but too much of a good thing can become a bad thing I had so many great things in my life but they were adding up to an unreasonable physically humanly impossible amount of work in time that really messed up my mental stability it's of course great to be involved in a lot of things and occupy your time and mind with things that you'll benefit from but I also do think that I needed a lot more free time and just boredom some of my best creative efforts have come out of being bored and just having nothing to do and having to come up with something to fill my time like this YouTube channel I made this because I was really bored in my freshman year and I thought maybe it'll be a fun thing and now look where we are now I don't know if this is like biologically and psychologically a sound analogy but to me it's kind of like letting the fields fallow an agricultural concept I guess of letting the fields relax and just have some time off for nutrients to seat back into the soil that way the next time you plant crops there the crops will grow well I'm not a farmer I'm sorry if I explained that wrong but I do feel like your brain kind of needs a similar thing to just let it relax and do nothing so that cool new ideas and inspiration and energy will come from it and besides that whole mental energy and creativity aspect of it I also think I just needed more time more hours in a day to explore and to try new things and to set forth new efforts instead of constantly staying stuck in the same things that I had over committed myself - hello it's me editing the same shirt for that awesome continuity and I just wanted to add that by not giving myself enough time to relax and recover all of my energy and creativity not only did it prohibit me from properly exploring new interests and new ventures but I also didn't get to actually get a hundred percent good and committed at the things I was doing like he could probably tell that in the middle of junior year my YouTube videos were not that great not that inspired not that 100 percent effort because I had burned myself out so you know if you want to be good at the things you're already doing over-committing is also not a great option speaking from someone who did it right I know we all want to be hustling all the time but you really do need some time off in order to be actually working at your best when you are working so now that we've gone through those five somewhat saddening things that I wish I had not done let's talk about five things that I am glad that I did [Music] one thing that I definitely don't regret is living my own life just for myself and not tailoring my entire life to college applications don't limit what you do in high school just to try to make yourself look better on college applications we all know that there are certain things to do and certain ways to live your life that are better for gaming the college application system for example having a very focused narrow profile for a particular field or subject that shows a lot of like passion in that area is supposed to be better for college applications my application profile was kind of a mess I didn't really have a focus I just spent my high school years exploring my pretty disparate interest I wouldn't say I messed around but I kind of did what I wanted without trying to plan it out like will this result in a cool thing that I can list on my extracurricular tab I'm glad I took my time in high school to explore so many of my very unrelated interests instead of trying to back myself into a narrow corner a narrow field early on in my life I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't been able to try all these things and determine what I enjoy but probably we won't try to make a job out of and what I enjoy and might want to pursue further expertise in for a career fields the second thing I'm really glad I did is learning how to read and type very very quickly I've always been a pretty avid reader and as a result I have a lot of practice with reading very very quickly also a my elementary school we have those type to learn games that we did really often and I got pretty darn good at typing I also played piano when I was little so that might have been helpful and learning how to type quite quickly but yeah I'm a frickin a fast typer and a freaking fast reader and these are two really useful skills for academics for example with fast reading it's a lot easier for me to get through standardized testing where time pressure might be an issue and I can get through my readings for class like textbook notes and assigned readings pretty fast as for typing quickly it's really useful for doing online class work and writing papers really really fast and fair taking notes in a fast-paced lecture where the teacher is just zooming through those slides also I can dominate people and typeracer the third thing I'm glad I did is refined my study skills and that's something I've been encouraged to do because I make this study advice channel there's something about giving advice to other people that really forces you to actually know what you're doing in the first place so I've learned a lot of new study skills and methods and tips and techniques and all of those cool buzzwords about how to actually study by doing research for the channel and trying to reflect on my own experience and formulate them into actually actionable tips this has forced me to think about what actually works best for me and do a ton of research about new methods that I can try out and see if they click with my learning style while I do I admit I've probably gotten lucky genetically because my parents are both super smart so I probably inherited a little bit of that natural intelligence I truly don't believe that I've just been coasting by on my natural intelligence I guess it was kind of lucky that I'm not one of the like super super smart gifted children who has been able to coast by through high school on their own natural intelligence instead I've like hit my cap of where I can get to just on natural intelligence alone and I've been forced to actually learn my study skills here in high school where things are a little bit easier it's a little bit easier to test the waters with your study skills without messing up too hard and this will be useful in college and beyond [Music] the fourth thing I did is figure out how to earn money I recognize that I am privileged in such a way that I did not have to work part-time to sustain my family during my high school years all of the money I've earned my parents have allowed me to keep under my own name which I'm super grateful for the main ways I have gotten that coin is one through YouTube the platform you're watching right now and through interning over the summer two main reasons that I'm glad that I did this was one I can learn a lot about personal finance because I actually do have some money that I need to learn how to manage also I'm just really glad I have those savings for college and adulthood and Beyond never hurts to have extra money saved up especially when you're super young and compound interest is most definitely in your favor if you'd like to hear more about like personal finance I guess I might make a video about that let me know if you'd be interested I'll put a poll in the cards over here the fifth thing that I definitely don't regret is that I have developed a bunch of habits that will help me stay healthy throughout the rest of my adult life I have a pretty darn good sleep schedule I am one of those Psychopaths who can get up at 6:30 without an alarm I just like knock out at 10:30 and then I wake up naturally at 6:30 I don't exactly know how I did this but my brain works like this so I'm glad it figured itself out like that I've also gotten into the habit of exercising and eating pretty decently as a result of sports I too used to hate running but then I did long-distance running for three years in high school and now I can't live without it hopefully that'll be good for me in my long term future health as far as preventing like cardiovascular disease but my knees are already busted so we'll see how the rest of my joints hold up as I get old I don't know who taught me this but I freaking love bland food which is probably gonna be good for my nutritional habits as I grow up I really love playing rice and plain noodles bitter tea with no sweeteners in it yes that is my favorite black coffee that's where it's at I'm just a dry sandy freak who likes bland food it'll be hopefully good for my long-term health I hope you found this video helpful and if you would like to share your own life advice please do share that in the comments below I also upload a new videos every Monday and my Instagram where I post photos of my notes and bullet journal is at study quill see you next time [Music] you [Music]

Channel: studyquill

Views: 120,319

Rating: 4.9858294 out of 5

Keywords: studytube, studyblr, studying, college, school, my high school regrets, high school advice, freshman advice, high school advice 2020, mistakes to avoid, most common mistakes, sophomore advice, freshman year advice, junior advice, senior advice, college application advice, my biggest regrets teens, what not to do in high school, high school dos and don'ts, my biggest regret, my biggest regrets in high school, high school experience, studyquill, high school tips, biggest mistakes

Id: kuzH00rit6I

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020