1. Giraffes 2024

       As spring break rolls around, the feeling of AP testing season looms on the horizon, this period both marks the months of possibly hard work and the possibility of impacting our future academic opportunities. It's time to embrace the ultimate 5 scoring strategy: cramming, yes you heard that right. Forget everything you have been told about steady strategy habits and balanced routines. We are diving headfirst into the chaos of last-minute panic because, let's face it, you got to take advantage of every minute and there is no thrill like living on the edge with a stack of books and a gallon of caffeine concentrated drinks.     Let's acknowledge the beauty of cramming. Who needs months of preparation when you can achieve the same level of stress and sleeplessness in just a few nights? The adrenaline rush of realizing you had an entire year of material in less than 48 hours is the equivalent of bungee jumping. It is an experience you will never forget. ...

Ever since I was a child, I participated in this Tamil poem recitation contest in the Bay Area that is sort of a way for me to keep in touch with my language while living in another country. This contest tested my ability to remember thousands of words and phrases that encouraged me to develop my memory by using unique strategies to maximize my retention of these words. As I participated in the recurring instances of this contest, I learned to like my language in a literary sense rather than just the speaking experience I have with my relatives and understand the deeper meanings that can be posed by these short phrases. Sometimes, I wonder how much of my language I really know and this competition has proven to be a great way to test myself and compare my memorization with the year before. The competition has an additional part where I have to recite the meaning of each phrase. I notice that as every year passes, I understand more about the phrases than I did the previous year, indicat...

image credit Some time ago, I read the Arc of a Scythe book series by Neal Shusterman , a dystopian sci-fi trilogy in a future when death and disease have become virtually eradicated. The world is basically governed by a sentient artificial intelligence program known as The Thunderhead. People can choose to “turn a corner,” or make themselves physically younger when their body becomes old, and rather than die in the traditional sense, the residents of this new world are subject to being “gleaned” by an elite group of people called scythes. Because of these drastic changes in the world’s society, most people look back at our time, the Age of Mortality, with a vastly different outlook than we see it. In fact, many people spend their time doing basically nothing, feeling almost none of the same emotions that we do. Shusterman’s approach to describing life in such a world, where we don’t have to constantly worry about our deaths or our loved ones’ deaths, is extremely unique; most authors...

  Many musicians tend to rely on their muscle memory without knowing it. If you have ever played an instrument before, you are probably aware of way instruments become easier to play the more you practice. Surprisingly, your mind does not need to be focused on playing the instrument during this time. Even if your brain is thinking about other ideas while you play, your sense of the instrument and the way your fingers play improves each time you practice.   This phenomenon, called muscle memory, is fairly contrary to what most people would expect. This is because practicing academic skills requires people to be consciously thinking about how to improve. On the other hand, musical prowess is gained by letting your minder wander and releasing one’s focus. An article on the power of muscle memory states that it “[frees] you to focus on telling a story with the music and your performance” ( StringOvation Team ). Muscle memory is actually more important than most people assume. With...

     I have grown up with lots of people in my life and each person would teach me a lesson.  A group of people who taught me what a team was, was my kung fu teammates. I started doing kung fu when I was 6 and joined the Wushu team just after a few months.      There were over 20 people on the team. Everyone was a few years older than me. I was a 6-year-old in a class filled with 10-16 year olds. Despite me being so young, they welcomed me with open arms. They would teach me all their tricks, and even if it took a while for me to learn, they would never give up on me. Sadly, after a few years, one by one they left for college. I was “left” behind, and now I am the 16-year-old welcoming the 7-year-olds.       One of the memories I remember was actually me crying during a class. We had to do this trick, which I had never learned before. Everyone was doing it with such ease and every time someone successfully did it, they cheered. I wa...

  AP testing week is upon us. The week where we cram a millions pieces of information into our brains, praying that we remember everything. The studying process is chaotic, stressful, and interrupted by multiple mental breakdowns and crying sessions, but thanks to AP Psychology, I have learned some tips that could be extremely helpful in retaining information.  Deep level processing is going to be your best friend, which involves retaining the material in a meaningful way rather than mindlessly memorizing definitions or concepts. This can be done by connecting concepts to something that is meaningful to you, as familiarity will help with the remembering and processing of information. Yesterday, I was doing my best to remember Erikson’s 8 psychosocial development stages. The first stage is “trust vs. mistrust,” when the infant has to grow trust towards their parents; this is followed by “autonomy vs. shame and doubt,” when the child is encouraged to explore their environment an...

  With AP season comes long study sessions where half the time we wont remember anything the day after. Our brains can hold so much information yet still manage to forget what we just did. To solve this, there are multiple different study methods that people can use in order to retain the most information before their tests.                   Oftentimes stress makes people forget the information they had just learned or makes them make bad decisions. For me, the day before a test I will cram as much as I can and then on the test if there was a question that was difficult I ended up blanking out and forgetting everything. One way to reduce the stress of taking a test is to split up study sessions throughout multiple days so you aren’t trying to relearn everything in one sitting. Trying to answer the easy questions on tests first can also help as it puts you in a mindset where you are confident of getting a good score overall. Th...

A pale beige building, a front yard filled with plants, a bike parked next to the garage, and the second-floor window open. My old house was less of a house and more of a memory cache.  In freshman year of High School my family and I moved from San Ramon to Fremont, leaving behind my childhood home. Recently, my dad sold our old old house and until it was taken away from us I hadn't realized how much I took it for granted.  Before it was sold my mom and I went to look at the house and it felt so wrong to see the house empty of all the stuff that used to fill it before. All of my family's random and sometimes useless belongings that somehow made the house feel like ours. We walked to the pantry door where my brother and I used to mark our heights every year. I couldn't stop crying after I realized that the markings of our growth had been thoughtlessly painted over. All that was left was a faint blue undertone where the blue marker we marked out heights with one year, when we...