<p>Hey all-</p>
<p>Tomorrow I'm moving into college (Wash U in St. Louis) so I am in a very contemplative mood. So I'm going to share with you guys and gals what I believed to help me the most throughout my high school career.</p>
<p>Intelligence is a very strange issue, and mixed with high school egos it can become even more convoluted. We all know of the "kid who doesn't study at all and aces every test," or the "jock who still manages to take 5 AP classes." Growing up in a competitive high school, I know what it feels like to compete with the best of the best. And to be honest, I didn't think that I was all that smart either. My parents always pushed me when I was in middle school because my SATs weren't that great and I seemed to always make careless mistakes in math. Unfortunately, a lot of very smart kids go through what I had to go through and, as a result, think they do not belong to the "smart clique" and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. It took me a long time to learn how I think.</p>
<p>My advice is to master how you think and focus on what you know, not what you don't know. This sounds like a cliche phrase your counselor or teacher may say, but nobody knows your brain better than you do. I realized that I read very slowly and made a lot of careless mistakes, but it is because I am a very conceptual learner. I learn concepts very quickly, but when I try to work with little details, my neurons misfire and I end up cognitively paralyzed. This reflected in my grades because I was not so hot at chemistry (which requires working with little details), but I was excellent at physics. Furthermore, I did very well in economics when others could not master the concepts. I learned to exploit what I was good and use the same skills to overcome my fallacies in other areas. For example, if I see a big ol' jumble of prose in a Chemistry problem, I usually have a hard time interpreting what the question is asking for in the first place. I understand that if I do know what it is asking, I will most likely be able to solve the question, so I concentrate all my energy into interpreting the prose, drawing diagrams if necessary. I feel like if I knew this lesson as a freshman, I would have done much better in high school (not that I haven't done well, but there was room for improvement).</p>
<p>If you ask people who they think the smartest kids at school are, my name probably won't pop up that often. But after this crucial lesson I learned, it really doesn't matter to me anymore. If you look at my transcript, you will see that my grades were always improving and the classes I took always got harder. I managed to score a 2300 on the SAT, 800s on 2 SAT IIs, and 5s on all of my AP exams (except the 4's on my LA exams. See what I mean?). In the end I was very satisfied because I got into many good schools, and I chose the one that suited me best.</p>