When the world stops understanding you and you start understanding yourself, remove the phrase ‘giving up’ in your vocabulary.

There are many things that may be running across your mind, but don’t be agitated by what’s happening around you. Start learning to learn yourself even more. Stress will be onto you as you have been notified that the grades in your Junior Year will be critical as these are the basis for your UPCAT and ACET performances. They will inform you that your whole college life depends on these bunch of decimal numbers that you only get to see on a piece of cardboard every quarter, and for consolation (just in case something goes wrong with them), they will tell you that grades are not everything. This everything will be a jumble of mess-related activities in your mind, all pushing themselves in front of you simultaneously.

After that, you will start realizing that there is no truth in what the others are saying that Sophomore Year was the hardest since they worked you up with overloaded units. This time, you know that the subjects can be deceiving:  a 1.5-unit Trigonometry can be really challenging, and before you know it, your 2-unit Chemistry has already taken its toll on you. You will feel like you’re being drowned in an ocean that has no water, and you will then end up being stranded in a desert all by yourself. And in that desert, you will see two objects equally dangerous: an STR subject that’s struggling to claw you inside out just for a simple topic proposal, and a carnivorous subject called Statistics - STR”s forever companion - which will make you grateful for cheat sheets of various formula for ANOVA and T-tests.

Delight yourself in the Lord. Your first ever high school Retreat will prove itself worthy of all the tantalizing requirements in Junior Year. You need a break, after all from these. And of course, a few Junior pranks never hurt - as long as nobody gets hurt either. Stay up late in school, sing out loud in the corridors with a bunch of friends, lay down on the field on a hot school day, “accidentally” break a glassware because you don’t know where your anger will take you (instead you blame your raging teenage hormones). Reflect again and again, with the matching sunset that accompanies your solitude when days seem so bland.

As for your electives, choose from various fields of science or dare yourself into a non-science elective. Push yourself to the limit, as long as it’s not off the cliff. Take Journalism or Creative Writing and write down your heart’s desire. Write plays. Direct. Act. Get involved with current issues and politics. Make a small change. Meet people in and out of the school; befriend them, even if they’re the pedicab drivers or the kid on the other side of the gate. Who knows, maybe there’s not much difference between the two other sides of the road - just a big gate emblazoned with the letters of the prestigious high school.

You will also have your first taste in Prom Asking. Finally, after year of waiting and watching the upper batches, it will be your turn to be mystified and demystified from the wonders of Prom. Break a heart, break your heart, stitch it, mend it back together, misplace yours or others - haven’t they told you that life is a series of trials and errors? Sometimes, there is no exact answer, almost the same as imaginary numbers and irrational ones. Even Math can prove you that.

And of course, appreciate your friends. They come from almost everywhere - from provinces, from private schools, from dorm rooms, from library couches, from behind the shady trees and even from the middle of asphalt and under the heat of the sun. I tell you, they’re quite hard to get.

Love,

Joe Jonas; Thanks for the best years of my life. (2007-2012)