High school is a great experience where students are able to do many things such as make friends and make friends… and, err… make friends. But wait, let me tell you my story. I think you’ll be able to learn that high school is more than just making friends.

My Thoughts are Worth a Penny
My first day of high school, I’m walking down the halls of a historic school that is about to finish its five-year-long restoration, and I have no idea where to go. I go to the end of the first building and find a woman standing next to what is presumably a wall – of papers. I read them, find my homeroom where I talk about what we did last summer with some of my friends, and I head off to live my new average high school life.
Fast forward to the beginning of the third nine-weeks, and now I have a GPA. I was excited because I had a 2.5. This is probably the highest GPA I’ll ever have before I start drowning in work, but on the bright side, I can officially participate in extracurricular activities such as my JROTC class’s drill team which impacts me so much that I start marching around school and at home.
My ninth grade life changed in my intensive reading class when we started doing a pro-con essay where I had to research a topic and write about it informatively. My classmates wrote about the usual topics—gay marriage and gun rights—but I had watched a video about the penny the night before my class was told about the assignment, so I decided to write about abolishing the penny.
I had to include the views from the people who wanted to abolish the penny and the people who didn’t. But, as it turns out, it was more than just abolishing the penny. The penny actually costs about 1.23₡ to produce, which means the country is losing 0.23₡ in the process. Anyways, that’s beside the point. What was more important is that I was the first one to finish the essay and I turned it in early. My teacher was impressed with my writing and invited me to his journalism class for my sophomore year. I decided to take up the offer just to see what it was like.

Becoming a Useful Member of Society
Now it’s sophomore year and I am in journalism which I immediately regret because I don’t know a single person in the class. I was fine for the first month, though, since I was mainly learning about the class rules, some ethics, some journalistic guidelines, and some other stuff, but when I took my picture for my journalism hall pass, I almost ran out of the class wanting to just drop out because I absolutely loathed being in any type of picture. Despite how I felt about the class and having to actually talk to people, I learned to enjoy it because I got to meet new people.
My first article was about Advanced Placement classes, and I just so happened to be in Advanced Placement Spanish Language & Culture at the time. I went to Miami High’s test chairperson to get some statistics, wrote my first draft, and then went to my AP class to take a picture for the article. I laid out the page and we published the paper. I felt accomplished. I felt like I finally had contributed something useful towards society.

P.O.R.N. Is a Bad Acronym
Junior year, I think this is going to be fun since I’m taking AP Psychology and Physics I honors. The first few months were nice. I learned about the physics teacher’s wife and her shotgun. AP Psychology was great too, since we had no teacher until October.
After the AP Psychology teacher came back, he started handing out old AP tests to prepare us for our end-of-year exam. I did just fine on the multiple choice questions, but the essays ruined my life because they called for specific terms that I was only able to recall by looking at the definitions. Meanwhile in physics, we were learning about collisions, and I had to do some assignments related to the five new equations I had to remember.
As the days passed by, my AP test came closer. My stress levels started skyrocketing because I started forgetting everything chapter-by-chapter. Luckily, my teacher gave us acronyms and memorable examples that helped me remember some things. One of these acronyms was P.O.R.N. (Proactive memory: Old information interferes with new information. Retroactive memory: New information interferes with old information).
Flash forward a few months, and I just finished the AP test. I felt confident in my performance. I felt like I did good and scored at least a 4. That wasn’t the case, though. I had a 3, which is still a good score, but this made me realize something, last-minute studying is not an effective method to gain a high score on an AP test.

The Jose’s Eye
“This is it! I’ve made it! Four years of stress, sweat, and tests have prepared me for this,” is what I said the first day of senior year, which started off great for me. I helped start The Miami High Times online publication, https://miamihighnews.com/, I was taking Dual Enrollment ENC 1101 with FIU, I was finally in T.V. Production, and as a community service project, I started a newspaper at a local middle school.
Starting the middle school newspaper was challenging since most of the schools I had proposed the idea to rejected it. After sending out dozens of e-mails and calling 6 different schools, I finally landed an interview with the assistant principal at Brownsville Middle school who gave me the chance to start something new, something that would help students write better and improve their critical thinking. The newspaper is now known as The Falcon’s Eye (https://falconseyebms.wordpress.com/) and covers everything at Brownsville Middle School from sports to teacher of the year and even has superlatives.
As the 2015-2016 school year draws to a close, I feel a need to continue this project not only at Brownsville Middle, but at other middle schools because news literacy is essential in the modern age.

DO IT! JUST DO IT!
High school is a great experience that no one should take for granted since you can only go through high school once. Throughout my tenure at Miami High, I have learned many life lessons. For example, if there is an obstacle in the way of your goals, then either jump over the obstacle or break through it and set a new standard. Nothing in life is impossible, so be like Shia Lebouf and “JUST DO IT! Don’t let your dreams be dreams.”
However, if I had the chance to change one thing about my high school career, I would have joined the Million Dollar Band. I have always been intrigued by our great marching band because their performances were so spirited. I was reluctant to join because I didn’t know anyone in the band and I was nervous that I would screw up. Now I realize that such things do not matter because being in the band would have still been a learning experience for me. Lesson learned: don’t be afraid to try new things.

To the Rising Seniors
Class of 2017, you’ve made it! All you have left is one school year and you’re done with school! But don’t think that you should slack off your senior year. Before the 2016-2017 school year starts, you should start looking at what colleges you want to go to and start applying to them. If you don’t have money for the application fee, then talk to Mr. Bain for fee waivers. Also make sure that you have outstanding community involvement because this might be the difference between being accepted to a college or not.