Published on March 11, 2021

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Easy High School Checklist: Freshman through Senior Year

• Post author By tbrg
• Post date March 11, 2021
• No Comments on Easy High School Checklist: Freshman through Senior Year

High school can be very hard, but its new shift to online mode has made things way more complicated. However, luckily not much has changed when it comes to the measures one should be taking to ace that high school career. Even though “taking life as it comes” is a great motto way to live by, having a strategy enhances the results and brings in more certainty. Every year in high school can be uniquely challenging, so we at The Big Red Group have made a high school Checklist for you to have a smooth sail through these four years.

Freshman Year (9th Grade):

1. Study! Study! Study! Your grades now contribute to your overall GPA used for college admissions. And seeing the fact that it only gets harder and more rigorous in the senior years, it’s better to have had a strong background in your early years.

2. Get involved! You don’t have to join every club, but at least find one interest that you’re passionate about. Over the years, we have seen how college admissions officers stress upon taking one thing up early in your high school career and sticking to it throughout. This is a more reliable way to get your foot in the door at a prestigious college.

3. Identify your field of interest for a career or major through online research. Even though any “Liberal Arts” college will always have your back with their impressive flexibility in terms of courses. However, looking into it early on and being sure by the time you graduate from high school is not all bad either.

4. Start making a list of accomplishments, awards, and recognition you receive. Even though you can get to it at the twelfth hour in your senior year and still get it done, maintaining a list gives you a sense of accomplishment as well as a realistic idea of where you stand.

Sophomore Year (10th Grade):

1. Make use of your summer! Work, play sports, volunteer, or attend a summer school. Earning recognition, certificates, as well as new friends and connections through these experiences, pay off in the long run.

2. Begin attending college and career fairs or events. This would save you a lot of time in your senior year touring colleges and also give you a sense of the kind of surroundings you’d prefer during college.

3. Research funding for colleges including scholarships, grants, loans, etc. Some of us have the means of attending college without any of these and some of us don’t. In any case, this helps take the immense amount of load on your parents off their shoulders and would also open up many more college options for you that were previously out of your reach.

4. Consider taking a practice test to prepare for PSAT. Many of the schools that conduct SATs, do have PSAT for their freshman and sophomore students. However, if your school doesn’t, it’s not a bad idea to register for one and get a head start on the process.

Junior Year (11th Grade):

1. Build a resume with your list of activities, awards, and recognition. By this time in high school, we have a good sense of the extra as well as co-curricular activities that interest us and have taken part in enough of them to start building a resume.

2. Begin taking on leadership roles in your school council, extracurricular activities, or sports team. This would not only help you during your school life but help your college application stand out from the rest.

3. Decide and register for ACT/SAT. By this time, you’d have gotten a good idea of how the test works and it would be good for you to take an official test so that you could start thinking about a retest if the score doesn’t come as expected.

4. Learn more about Early Decision, Early Action, and Regular deadlines. In most cases, it’s best to apply early. So it would help you in your application process to start looking into it as early as you can.

Senior Year (12th Grade):

1. Make sure you’re set to complete all graduation requirements for both high school as well as the colleges you’re applying for. A good way to go about it would be to check the “requirements” section on their websites and not turn a blind eye to it until it’s very late.

2. Retake SAT/ACT if you feel you can get a better score! Do not worry about the number of retests because colleges don’t care about the number of attempts you took, just your best score!

3. Start requesting your teachers and guidance counselors early to write letters of recommendation. It can get very hard and hectic to get those letters when the entire senior class is rushing to get it done at the last minute.

4. Complete and submit college scholarship applications before the deadline! In most cases, colleges have their scholarship deadlines much before their regular and we don’t want to miss that at any cost.

5. Lastly, as college acceptance letters arrive, explore the campus, the financial aid package, and other things that matter to “you” and then make the right decision!

Share this checklist with your friends and family so they also have a clear idea of how to go about doing this and it turns into a cakewalk for them as well!

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How to Become a Straight-A Student in High School

• Post author By tbrg
• Post date March 11, 2021
• No Comments on How to Become a Straight-A Student in High School

“A little organization goes a long way”. Becoming a straight-A student is not so much about study hacks or brutal cramming sessions. The path towards academic success has a lot to do with disciplined time management, organization, and smart study techniques that focus more on comprehension than straightforward memorization. In today’s blog, we will be discussing some of the strategies that real-time top-scoring students use to get the best possible grades and which can be found in a book written by Cal Newport titled “How to Become a Straight-A Student”.

Today we will be covering only some of the initial concepts of the book, the so-called study basics. Since the book is rich in advice for school and studying, I highly recommend you to explore the rest of the book.

The first thing you need to consider is a simple equation. Work accomplished equals time spent multiplied by the intensity of focus. The concept that studying in short bursts of time in a regular pattern is more important to your information retention than trying to compensate for long periods of procrastinating, with study sessions that last for hours. Effective time management can be achieved in five minutes a day, in a system comprised of a calendar, where you should schedule specific-time events and a list which you should carry with you at all times.

The idea is to use five minutes each morning to write down the list of tasks you have to complete that day and go through the reminders of yesterday to update your calendar each morning. In that way, you create a self-sustaining time management system that relies on simple tools. Basically, as you plan your day, your page or piece of paper should be divided into two columns – a list for your “today’s” schedule” and a list for “things to remember”. Today’s schedule should be filled with dedicated time slots assigned for specific classes or tasks. “Things to remember” should be a place where you write down new assignments and tasks that are created during that day and which you need to migrate into your calendar the following morning during your daily five minutes of time management.

The type of tools you use to achieve this system should take into account your preferences and lifestyle; you can either go digital or analog, opt for a more complex planner or a simple piece of paper folded in your pocket. While scheduling tasks during the day you should take into account its priority in your overall list. Most important tasks should be tackled first, in case they’re not time-specific, and less important tasks should be tackled last. If something goes wrong with those less important tasks, you can always migrate them to a later time. Besides that, for the simple hierarchy of importance, it’s also crucial to leave enough buffer time in each one of your time slots to anticipate mistakes or delays.

Even if you excel at time management habits, beating procrastination is still key to allow you to actually *do the stuff.*

The book discusses five main strategies that can help you with this:

1. Keeping a work progress journal, where you record what you worked on or whether you were able to complete all the required tasks. It’s basically a habit tracker for your work that relies on a streak method to keep you motivated.

2. Eating the right food and the correct amount of water to boost your levels of energy and focus.

3. Making an event out of the worst tasks, which means that you can go to a different place to study, breaking your routine and creating a sense of novelty. It also allows you to block some time in your calendar since you’re going to a different, probably more distant place.

4. Building a routine for daily studying by deciding on which days you will work on specific subjects or topics, at what times, and for how long. As work starts transforming into a habit, it will be easier to convince yourself to start studying.

5. Choosing the hard days. This means that when all hell breaks loose, designating a couple of days as “hard days” will isolate time of high-intensity work from other regular work. A couple of tips for scheduling hard days is informing your close friends that you will be going through a hard study period as well as scheduling entertaining or relaxing activities right after you finish all of your work.

6. Furthermore, straight-A students know when, where and how long they should be studying. Giving a solid answer to these three questions and sticking with them for a long period of time will improve your study routine, and the more consistent your study routine is, the better your results will be. While Cal Newport uses many top-scoring students’ feedback to say that early morning is the best time to study, I prefer to recommend to you whatever schedule your energy levels are at the highest point, be at night, morning or afternoon.

Regarding the space where you should study, the overall recommendation is to study in isolation, somewhere that improves your focus, eliminates distractions, and separates leisure from work. Regarding the question about “how long you should study”, no more than one hour at a time, depending on your level of motivation and energy. Even when you are on a roll, it’s important to take regular breaks and remember to keep your study sessions short overall.

Now that you know how to become a straight-A student, in the comments section share which hack would you want to include in your routine.

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How to be a Failure

• Post author By tbrg
• Post date February 17, 2021
• No Comments on How to be a Failure

When was the last time you read about a ‘failure’ in a positive light? Generally, you see them paraded on news channels as the scum of society. The most entertaining failures for the media are those who used to be considered successes at one point. So we’re thrown these images in our faces, as an example of what not to become. And thus we grow up fearing failure or at least seeing it in a negative light. Starting from our school days, exams are made to feel like life or death. Bunk actually failing, sometimes it feels like even getting below 80% is considered a failure. So we stress ourselves out, constantly tense about failing, creating monstrous scenarios in our head. And we forget what failing is all about.

Fail Fast And Often
When you fail at something, it simply means that you did something wrong. If you don’t fail, how else would you know? That is why the motto in Silicon Valley is ‘Fail Fast’. Seems almost nonsensical to hear, but they live by it. There is no stigma in Silicon Valley of failing, so people aren’t afraid. They try, fail, learn from it, and make changes to try again. If Steve Jobs had stopped trying after he got fired from Apple, you wouldn’t have an iPhone. He got fired from his own company, he could have easily sat and cried into his pillow. No. He went and started another company. And then another. Until he finally got back to where he wanted to be.

The thing that any successful person will tell you is that they went through multiple moments of failure to get to where they are. Anybody who tells you otherwise is flat-out lying. There is not a single example of someone who has succeeded but has not seen some form of failure. So technically, by not failing you’re actually stopping yourself from succeeding.

Failure Is Just The Start
The trick is to not stop at any failure. Always look at failure as a learning opportunity. Sounds cliché, but why look at it as anything else? There is nothing to gain from looking at it negatively. When NASA was trying to send humans into space, hundreds of rockets exploded. Those were failures. But they still ended up putting a man on the moon in 1969. Just imagine if they had stopped. You wouldn’t have had Google Maps. Those failures led them to develop better rockets, led to more satellites being launched, which led to GPS. You’d have still been asking for directions from strangers.

Now, whenever you do fail, it’s going to be a shitty moment and you’re going to feel terrible. Nobody enjoys failing, you aren’t a robot. The point is how you respond at that moment. Can you rally yourself out of that feeling and onwards?

Let Failure Make Your Brain Work
You can overcome failure by increasing the odds of success. Often times we fail because we don’t create the right situations for ourselves. Did you put in the effort? Did you find all the solutions to a problem? Are you being honest with yourself or are you just lost in wishful thinking? Are you being realistic? These are all questions we must ask ourselves. If someone is putting in 40 hours of effort every week, and another is doing 80 hours, who are more likely to succeed?

The fear of failure should also make us relook at our motivations. If you’re afraid of becoming a singer because you’re afraid of failing, then you need to check your motivation. Maybe you want to be famous, more than you want to sing. You can as easily fail at business as you can at singing. You can also get fired from a job. So why fear failure only with singing?

There is no to-do list for success. All you need to do is fail. Set yourself up for failure so you know how it feels. The fear will slowly reduce and then start trying to set yourself up for success. You’ll still fail, it’s fine. Learn from it and move on. Fail again and again, but don’t stop. Fail, learn, move on. Do this enough and you will succeed. But if you stop, there is absolutely no chance of succeeding. When the moment comes, and it will come, how will you respond to it?