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A Workaholic's Perspective on Relaxation

Does your life leave you enough time to relax? Throughout the past few semesters, my school and after school schedule has been hectic. Between constant sports practice, academic work, clubs, and extracurricular commitments, I’d often find myself pushing my sleep schedule later to accommodate the heightened workload. Weeks at a time would blur by in routines, weekends spent catching up on sleep and assignments. If my life were organized into a Google Calendar, there would only be one six-hour part of the day devoid of events, between one and seven AM: sleep. Despite this hectic schedule, I rarely felt as though I were overworking myself, nor did I feel as though I had no time to relax. Perhaps I am a workaholic, but there was an enriching essence within the work itself that motivated me to continue doing all the different activities I was doing. Over time, the work stopped feeling like work, and activities themselves became the breaks when I stopped taking them too seriously. Take dista...
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An Extrovert's Take on Spending Time Alone

 Do you like being alone? As an extrovert, I love talking to people. From friends I’ve known since elementary school to the stranger sitting next to me on the plane, each person is an opportunity for conversation, to share stories with, to learn from. Thus, throughout the first two years of high school, I strongly disliked being alone. Being alone meant that I couldn’t find anyone else to talk to. The world around me felt boring without people around. During the rare times I was alone, I didn’t know what to do. I’d often turn to social media and the internet to enter some semblance of a social setting.  I’d often watch various forms of media for hours on end, mindlessly, with the purpose of passing the time. Listening to a 20-minute video essay on YouTube felt better than sitting alone, reading a book, or starting a problem set. Over time, my avoidance of being alone gradually diminished. It began with running. During the times I’d run alone over the weekend, I found the sound...
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The Art of Doing Nothing

Prompt: Is “doing nothing” a good use of your time? Senioritis traditionally emerges during the second semester of senior year. With standardized testing and application deadlines in the rearview mirror, most seniors–myself included–put their academic studies aside to focus on having the best last semester of high school. There’s a carefree nature to the spring of senior year that feels like the prospect of summer vacation–a semester, in other words, of doing nothing.  Now that I’m a senior with raging senioritis, I’ve been determined to make the most out of the rest of senior year. Although I haven’t learned much in the classroom, I’ve learned to embrace the contrasting forms that “doing nothing” has taken over the past couple months. In January, I learned that the act of doing nothing could be destructive. Without a clear end goal in mind, the days blurred by. Without schoolwork, I turned to social media apps and into the realm of infinite scrolling. My weekly screen time, previo...
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Two and a Half Years

Prompt: What’s your role in your family? Much can happen within the span of two and a half years. From seventh to ninth grade, a global pandemic and a personal deep dive into the world of Brawl Stars. From ninth to eleventh grade, a shift in focus from math competitions to pure mathematics.  But the most important two and a half years in my life aren’t related to any specific time period. These two and a half years remain constant no matter how much time has passed–the age difference between myself and my older brother, Andy. In my early childhood, this two-and-a-half year gap translated into an unquenched competitive drive, as my brother had a head start of both wisdom and experience. I was far behind in science, reading, and math, but I discovered other metrics that were more favorable to me. I wanted to establish myself beyond the title of Andy’s younger brother, so I took on chess, soccer, and swimming. My skills improved rapidly with these competitive goals in mind. However, i...
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The Past Tastes Bittersweet

Prompt: Do you wish you could return to a moment from your past? In my first semester of junior year, I wanted to go back–to the six weeks of summer I spent at a math camp in Columbus, Ohio. And yet, when I first arrived, I was convinced that the experience would be six mundane weeks of staring at symbols and numbers for hours on end.  Although the daily problem sets did take up most of my time, I gradually improved as the weeks passed. From a handful of assumptions, I learned to make conjectures, test their validity, and discover lines of reasoning to establish them as proof. Numbers and their properties, primality, modular exponentiation, quadratic reciprocity: the sheets of scratch paper became grounds for discovering how beautiful theorems emerged from the mundane.  Equally as engaging as the mathematical content were the people I met at that math camp. It didn’t matter if a fellow camper was from Texas, California, Virginia, Illinois–we were there to explore together, six...
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