What stuff should I focus on in high school?

Pre-College Issues High School Life
1

I’m a rising sophomore and I have a few problems as I have no idea how to properly manage all the extracurriculars in my life. I’ve tried to narrow down all the things I’m involved in into 2 categories:

Performance: I play the piano and violin in my school’s orchestra, but I’m not too great at both and just play for fun. I’m also somewhat involved in theatre, and have been in around 7-8 plays/musicals at school and at local theatres (I’ve been the lead role once, but that was a few years back). I also recently joined my schools choir (upon request of my theatre friends) and have been really involved in that the last couple of months. I’ve also been on my school’s speech team, and have won a lot of awards for that at local tournaments, but didn’t qualify for state :(. Finally, I’m on my school’s debate team and have won a few awards debating at a JV level, but nothing too impressive. Also I’m attempting to make my own YouTube comedy channel with skits and parodies, but I’m not sure if that’s something that I’d mention as a productive use of time, and I have yet to fully start that.

Nerdy things: I’m currently going into Calc 3 via a local university’s program, so I’d consider myself decent at math. I’m on my school’s math team and I am a valuable member of the team, although I don’t really participate in math competitions outside of this (unless my friend convinces me to). However, I do help organize math events and competitions for fun. Additionally, my friends and I are starting a math tutoring service over the summer (mostly to earn extra cash, but also because we love teaching) but we have yet to fully start it. I also co-taught a volunteer weekend Indian history class for kids with my uncle, but I don’t think I’ll have the time for that next year. The last important thing that I did was going to the state science fair for a group project about neural networks, although we didn’t win anything once there.

My problem is that I genuinely love doing all the things that I do, but I’m not sure if I want to keep doing some of them as they could get in the way of each other. For example, I missed a lot of the debate season last year as a freshman since my school’s musical interfered with it a bunch, and I don’t want to choose between debate and theatre. I understand that I’ll have to narrow my focus down, but I’m not sure how, especially considering the fact that I want to join new things next year as well.

Any thoughts and help?

2

If you are a rising sophomore in Calc 3, that is VERY impressive, by the way.
Pick something that you really excel at. If you’re not doing the JV sport for fun, I’d get rid of it. Sports take up a lot of time, especially when/if you get to the varsity level where you’ll have tournaments at the end of the year. If you don’t have much time as freshman, the problem will only get worse — freshman year should be your easiest.

3

I wouldn’t really spend too much time worrying about violin or piano, sorry. Your membership on the math team and the fact that you’re taking calculus 3 look good. It really just boils down to being good at what you do rather than doing a lot of things that really aren’t that impressive or relevant to academia. Honestly, just focus on getting as high a GPA as possible and SAT score; being on the math team is a story you could tell in your admissions essays.