There are way too many pieces of high school advice to give to freshmen out there for me to write in one article. Four years of knowledge pressed into one article? That’s impossible. Ezgi Ustundag might have pulled it off though, so you should definitely check out that column.

            One small tidbit I can pass down, however, is to take Mr. Johnson’s AP Literature class senior year. With all due respect to Mrs. Seibert and Mr. Junck, Lit was the chillest class I have ever taken. Hardly any homework and we mostly just watched movies. That’s every slacker seniors dream. But at the same time, I reinforced one of the most valuable lessons of my high school career in that class.

            We got an article from the Wall Street Journal at the very beginning of class one day. It was a list of things the author wished someone had told him when he graduated. It stressed the importance of building strong relationships with people. It was then that I realized how important this basic idea really is, so I want to stress the same idea to you right now.

            I’m sure you’ve got plenty of people telling you the importance of persistence in academics right now. Your parents are probably already driving home the point that you need to be studying, well, all the time. Sometimes it probably feels like good grades are the only thing that matter in your life. But in the end, you’re going to have a pretty crappy time throughout high school if you only focus on getting A’s in all your AP classes.

            That’s why I’m here to tell you that it’s your encounters with classmates every day that are sometimes even more important than the material you’re learning in class. There are some pretty amazing people at this high school, and it would be a real shame for you to go through it so focused on your grade point average that you don’t get to know some of them.

            So don’t be afraid to miss an assignment’s deadline because you were spending time with a friend the night before. It’s alright to not practice your speech so you can go grab a coffee over lunch. It’s not great to shirk your work because of friends, but it’s even worse to shirk your friendships because of work. In the end, surely how many close friends you keep in touch with after high school is a better marker of your success here than how many A’s you got.

            If you can manage to slow down, stop stressing out about your grades, and focus on building some solid relationships in the four short years that you have here, you’re going to have an absolute blast in high school. Trust me.