Brettia

It’s been an unbelievably long time since I last wrote anything substantial, and there’s so much to talk about. I’m not really sure where to begin. I wrote my last entry in which I covered what was going on in my life way back in January, and it would be an understatement to say that things are very different now from the way they were back then. I could try to remember things, go back and summarize it all, but truthfully, most of it doesn’t really matter all that much. However, I guess there are some more important events or changes that I should mention.

The most important one, of course, is the end of high school, and of the IB “experience.” I could feel things starting to draw to a close as early as the beginning of May, when the IB exams started. I had an exam every school day for two weeks, and all homework and assignments pretty much ceased. I skipped class many times in that period, sometimes so that I could do some last minute cramming, other times just so that I could lay around and not have to think about school for a few hours. I suppose I wasn’t really “skipping” anything, since I always had a parent call me out of school and usually the classes I missed were IB ones that were all but over anyway. My senior year was not nearly as glorious and enjoyable as everyone says it is supposed to be, so I guess maybe I was entitled to some laziness toward the end.

There is no question that my last school year was a difficult one. Taking IB Math HL was a huge mistake. The two other IB students in that class (it was combined with AP Calculus BC) had both had a semester of high-level math before that class. I had been denied that semester because of my tight course schedule, and originally I was going to take calculus at Stanford to make up for it. But my advisor at Stanford told me that it would be a waste to take math there just to prepare for a high school math course, as the credit I would earn at Stanford would be the same as the credit I would get for IB Math HL. In other words, I would be earning the credit twice. Not wanting to waste money, and wishing even less to pollute my wonderful pre-college experience at Stanford with the ugliness of calculus, I took a Greek and Latin word roots class instead. Compared to CS 106A, that class wasn’t really very exciting, but it did appeal to my love for languages. Unfortunately, when I started IB Math HL at the beginning of last year, I found myself woefully unprepared. Though I usually did all right on quizzes, I rarely scored higher than a B on a test, and sometimes I was lucky to get a C. I’m still not entirely sure what my problem was. Before that class, I had always done well in math, though I never really liked it. I guess the combination of ill-preparedness, increased workload in other classes, and apathy on my part was enough to doom me to failure. There were times when I really did want to learn the material, and I berated myself for my laziness. I spent a weekend or two doing nothing but math in an attempt to catch up. But nothing ever seemed to work, and I always felt like I was a half-step behind. Eventually the class was reminding me too much of IB Physics, in which my labs never seemed to be exactly right and my grade was always right on the edge of being a B+. It was frustrating, to say the least.

If the class was unpleasant, the IB Math HL exam was torturous. It was not just difficult because the problems were hard, but because in many cases I had never even seen the types of questions they were asking before. The class was three terms long, and the whole time we basically followed the AP Calculus BC curriculum. We did two IB math projects on the side, and we were supposed to be doing problems from the IB Math textbook every week or so (though we only got about halfway through the book). In the last term of the class, the teacher gave us some practice tests he’d found online, and it was then that we knew we were doomed. I say “we” because the other two IB Math students felt the same way I did. The main problem was that we simply hadn’t covered most of the IB Math curriculum. Unlike AP Calculus BC, IB Math is only about 30% calculus. The rest is a jumble of geometry and trigonometry (which would seem easy since I had already taken geometry and trigonometry classes, except that IB Math takes it to a whole other level), logic and reasoning, and a huge chunk of statistics and probability. So the exam was a completely horrendous experience. I left more than half of it blank, answered many questions with bullshit answers, and once I even gave an answer that had nothing to do with math, something like, “The probability of Sally sending text messages to her friends from 5:30 to 6:30 is zero, because her family eats dinner during that time period.” Even worse, the IB diploma criteria doesn’t allow for failing a higher-level class, even if taking that class as a higher-level one was an option (I could have done Math SL, but I was told it would be really easy). As far as I know, my grade is calculated using both my exam score and my scores on the math projects, so there is at least a tiny bit of hope that I will get the three out of seven necessary to still get my IB diploma. The scores aren’t released until July 6th, so I get to wait until then to see if my bullshitting was good enough or not.

The other exams really weren’t too terrible. Biology was perhaps the hardest, mainly because the second-semester teacher was disorganized and didn’t really make it through all of the material. I learned a lot from cramming the night before the test, though…so maybe that helped. In some ways the exam period was fun - I felt like I was in college: skipping class, going to late-night study groups, trying desperately to find and organize notes from years ago, etc. When I finally came back to school for the last two weeks after the exams were over, I was struck by how dumb high school seemed after that little ordeal. All the idiotic rules and immature drama…so pointless, so stupid. The final days were somewhat enjoyable, but somehow I still had a lot left to do. The last issue of the newspaper was scheduled to come out on the seniors’ last day, May 31, and I had to work on it almost non-stop for a week in order to get it finished. The toil was worthwhile, though - it was easily our most polished issue in the past two years, an achievement crowned by two distinguishing features: full-color printing and a two-page “Senior Destinations” spread where we put all the seniors’ names on a series of maps to illustrate where they planned on going to college. I got compliments on it from dozens of people, from classmates to friends’ parents to random kids in the hallway.

Though May 31 was the last day of classes, I still had to go to school the next day for a senior awards assembly, after which we had a barbecue and played ultimate frisbee. Finally, the four long years of high school had come to an end, and I couldn’t have been happier. Graduation came on the following Sunday, and my grandparents from Missouri as well as my grandma from Colorado visited and watched me receive my diploma. Since then, life has been pretty laid back (maybe a little too laid back) - I’ve worked on websites, watched a lot more TV than usual, gone to a few graduation parties, slept for nine hours almost every night, showered twice a day for no particular reason, and played an occasional video game, though I find them to be less and less entertaining lately.

I finally feel as if I have overcome the terrible lack of motivation or confidence that I suffered from after the move from Arizona. Since December, I’ve been to numerous small gatherings with some friends I met through the IB program, usually involving the game Guitar Hero, which I’m abnormally skilled at playing. While I’m still no social butterfly, I at least feel as if I have some semblance of a life outside of school again. I even find myself craving social interaction on days when my friends are busy and my IM buddy list gray and empty. While I still have a long way to go before I could call myself socially skilled, I’m not totally inept anymore, and it feels good. Something that hasn’t changed, though, is that I don’t require all that much to be happy with people. Some kids seem to only want to go to a party if it’s massive and alcohol is somehow involved, or they only want to hang out with people if there’s some fun activity planned (Six Flags, water-skiing, shopping, etc.). But I find myself not caring all the much about what I do with my friends…the important thing is just being together and enjoying each other’s company. Some nights we’ll just sit at someone’s house not really doing anything at all - talking or watching a movie or whatever. But sometimes those moments are better and more substantial than any wild party could ever be.

I don’t think there’s too much more left to talk about now…I guess I should mention that, for all my efforts to go elsewhere, I’m still going to college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Don’t get me wrong, Madison’s a great school, perhaps one of the best public universities in the country. It’s just not exactly my dream school. I applied to a lot of places, many of them probably out of my reach academically, and some of them surprised me by putting me on their waitlists or even offering me admission. Two schools that I didn’t even apply to sent me letters offering admission and a full-ride scholarship for being a National Merit Scholar. In the end, I had three options: Pomona College, UW-Madison, and the University of Texas at Dallas. I was surprised to be admitted to Pomona because less selective colleges had rejected me; Pomona only admits around 15% of applicants and, though few people have heard of it, it’s one of the top colleges in the country. UT-Dallas was one of the schools that offered me a full-ride, and their offer was tempting. I visited the campus over spring break, and I was pretty impressed by the experience. They have a large and growing computer science program and strong ties to local industry (North Texas, I guess, is sort of like a Silicon Valley for the Midwest), and they offered me enough money to cover basically all of my college-related expenses. However, I was worried about the strength of their non-computer-related programs, and I wasn’t really sure I wanted to live in Texas all that much. Also, though certain aspects of the campus were really nice, such as the student apartments (four students to a suite, only two students per bathroom, kitchenette, laundry room, swimming pools, etc.), it just didn’t seem like a traditional college campus to me. Many students commuted to campus, and it was located in the middle of a suburb where there were mostly houses and few shops or restaurants. I eventually decided that UT-Dallas just wasn’t right for me, though not without much deliberation. The more difficult decision was choosing between Pomona and UW-Madison. Really, there wasn’t really much of a choice - it was obvious that Pomona was better in almost every possible way. However, when I started looking at the financial aid package I had been offered, I found that accepting the admission offer was almost impossible. Even in the best case scenario, I would leave Pomona with about $50,000 in debt. So I basically chose Madison for lack of any other viable option.

Although things didn’t work out as I imagined they would, I’m still excited for college. Finally I will be completely on my own and free to do what I want. Madison is a really neat town, almost like a San Francisco or Denver but plopped in the middle of the Upper Midwest, and the UW campus is right next to the downtown area. I’ll also have the prospect of going home to Arizona over breaks to look forward to, as my family is in the process of moving back this summer. Though a year ago I was almost certain I wanted to study computer science and eventually become a software engineer, now I’m not so sure. While I love programming and building websites, I am somewhat different from the average programmer in that I enjoy writing code because of the language aspect of it, not the mathematical or logical aspects. I like reading and writing in English and Spanish about as much as I enjoy reading and writing PHP or Java or Ruby. And I’ve always loved history, too, probably because it is so closely tied to language and the interpretation and analysis of language from many different sources. And there is the more recent addition to my list of favorite subjects: philosophy. (Perhaps you see now why I was so enthralled by the prospect of going to a liberal arts college like Pomona even though I want to study computer science.) I think the best possible academic scenario for me would be some sort of double major in computer science and one of those other subjects. Hopefully I’ll also get a chance to work on few research projects of some kind, and maybe study abroad. Assuming that I get my IB diploma, I’ll have about 25-30 credits before I even start college, so I should have some extra time for such things. It does seem as if IB will at least count for something at Madison - most of the private colleges only take IB credits if your scores are near-perfect, so the diploma just helps you get admitted, but Madison seems to want to reward IB students pretty handsomely.

Before I post this I have one final, wonderful announcement to make: after many years of frustration and suffering on the Windows platform, I have made the switch and am now a proud owner of a MacBook Pro. I needed a laptop for college and Macs are finally not so horribly expensive as they once were, so I took the plunge. So far I’ve been pretty impressed, but I’ll save my experiences for another entry. Until next time…adios.