I remember back when I was in grade 12, I was worried about whether I would make it into UWaterloo CS. I spent a lot of my time stressing about marks and what my future would look like.
Looking back now, there were so many things I learned, and things I realized were also important besides getting good marks. If you're in the same boat as I was in grade 12, here are 4 pieces of advice I'd give.
Disclaimer: all of this comes from my own experience.
- The most important thing is to take care of yourself. You won't have energy to do what you want to do if you don't get enough sleep, eat enough, take enough breaks, exercise enough (and other self care).
In grade 12, I got quite burnt out near the end of first semester; I couldn't get myself to study or do anything productive. I don't really remember how I got through feeling burnt out, but I remember what I could manage to do was still try my best and not be too harsh on myself for outputting only 30% of what I could usually do.
I would also advise making time to force yourself to relax or not think about your work – that might look like listening to music, reading books, going on a run or hanging out with friends (whatever works best for you).
- Know why you are doing something. It is so much easier to put in more time and effort for something if you find that work meaningful. In other words, you know the stuff you're doing is important and you're not doing it just for the sake of doing it.
Two things I spent a lot of time on this past year was getting good marks in school and organizing JAMHacks. For school, I knew I wanted to study CS and I needed to get good marks to get into top schools for CS. For JAMHacks, I knew how much impact hackathons had on me; I wanted to be able to contribute meaningfully to people like me, or others who didn't know they wanted to go into tech but changed their mind because of hackathons.
In particular, I don't think it is worth your time to do something just for the sake of university applications – what matters is that you're good at something vs. the extracurricular you pursue (more in point 3).
- What you do is more important than where you do it. Here I want to bring up Acon as an example: She didn't study that much in high school and instead spent a lot more time into things that she felt a lot more passionate about. I know she put in a lot of time and effort into running Apocalypse; I'd be doing calculus homework in class and Acon would ask me what I thought about the 1000th shirt design iteration she created. In the end, she didn't make it into UW CS (still got into other top programs like UofT CS and UW Math). However, what mattered was that she spent her time doing things that she found important – as a result, she's currently interning as a SWE at Hack Club and had plenty of cool opportunities that have come her way, including speaking at GitHub Universe.
What I'm trying to say is this: As long as you put a lot of effort into something (which doesn't have to be school-related), that something can turn into something meaningful. In other words, I think it's way more important that you're really good at something, whatever that may be, and put in a lot of hard work into what matters for you, rather than worrying about what university/program you will end up in. In the end, it's far more important who you are vs. where you are.
- While school might seem meaningless sometimes, there's still a lot you can gain from trying hard and doing your best. You might think to yourself, when am I ever going to use chemistry in the future? I had that exact thought when I was taking Grade 12 AP Chemistry. And the honest answer to that is, probably never. However, what I gained out of working really hard in that class was learning how to study well and learn concepts that I didn't understand at first.
As a result, when I see a topic I don't understand at first, my first instinct isn't: I'm too dumb to learn this, but rather, I know if I put in enough work and ask for help I will understand this. Having this attitude towards learning is something that will benefit you in the long run, and is something that I learned out of really pushing myself to do my best and never giving up. There are a few more things that I learned from maximizing my marks in high school: a) Try to enjoy what you're doing and make it fun – it will make the task at hand (studying) less painful. b) I learned how to manage my time well, between balancing my academics and extracurriculars. c) I became a lot better at doing things even when I didn't want to.
To whoever's reading this: You got this :)