a couple things that they didn't cover in the thing/were in your spiel
1) the guy who presented (Hal Wooser or whoever) played ridiculously distorted guitar at our fall festival music event and is chill guy all around
2) that was actual a pretty normal/above-average amount of people to go to the info session
3) public speaking sounds like it sucks but as long as you take a lot of cyanide I mean don't sweat it and remind yourself of the other people (they'll do poorly as well except for a few kids with talent), you'll do fine. fair warning though, you don't write a speech, you'll write an outline and then improv the details
4) I had 11 slots my year :P
5) don't bother being worried about the testing, it's not testing on on actually hard stuff, here's a quick overview of my day at testing
got incredibly sick in the morning, shook it off
each test is anywhere from 10 to 25? questions and 8 to 12 minutes long, you'll have plenty of time
english type stuff, word association - color : red - and analogies, 3 tests
math, basic computation, equality, simple stuff, 3 tests
spatial, this is the interesting one. basically it revolves around you being able to think in/imagine environments to manipulate in order to reach an answer. i.e. they'll show you a folded piece of paper with hole(s) in it and you have to imagine the unfolded piece of paper, 3 tests
social studies, this one is ~60 questions, and you'll have a decent amount of time to do it. this one was about understanding statistics, logic, and ultimately having some common sense
writing, non-specific topic, choose-a-side-and-argue based, practice for this one. have your parents get prompts on the internet and write a 6 paragraph paper for each one. trust me, it helps
you'll get a couple breaks in the middle of these
note that these may note be accurate for the upcoming thing
6) make sure you get good teachers for the recommendations. if you have arco, he's amazing, I got one from mahaffey, your language teacher is good if you kept the same one every year, teachers that you've had for a long period of time/are in non-boring subjects are probably your best bet
7) yeah, the internet is a non-priority here. I'm just starting to pick up my accounts and stuff - and that's probably not a good thing. half the time I get home and just want to play video games.
8) don't worry about other people, I know a girl in trig plus, and a girl in ap german, yet they still have very little of the massive amount of trivia and music sense that I have (both are musicians). will there be arrogant people? yeah sure, but probably more of the type that goes "why doesn't everyone else care as much as me"
9) you don't have to pretend you care all of the time. I spend that precious time explaining to the ~1 person that acts like that why they don't need to care.
10) you might want to drop the "oh man I'm such an average/lame/boring/untalented person" thing. even if you do believe so, it's just because of the uncultured and unnurturing environment of stonewall. everyone's super open-minded at stonewall, I went from being the class freak to being the cool drummer kid. also, I know people who that ticks off to no end.
11) speaking of which, from my experience, chicka kids might act a little weird. that's fine, they get a much better gifted program, so some of them are very non-self-sufficient in extracurricular activities.
12) french means mrs. hefty (well, I call her frau hefty cause I do german). prepare for her to be shocked that you don't know everything that you technically should. studying probably helps, but when you're in my case and just doing raw grammar, that can be a little harder.
13) haha no this isn't a perfect school. it pretty much feels like normal high school.
14) some more info on transportation, you'll go to ld by 8a, get picked up with the kids from oak knoll and chick already on the bus, and then you get a 20 min minimum ride to the inner-city. in the afternoon you get on the same bus and get dropped off at whatever school is most convenient. the freshman (or sophomore if you get in) is going to be the loudest, sorry. we're all pretty cool.
15) studying isn't your main problem. I coasted through 8th because of the lackadaisical rhino teacher's homework, mw has so much more. be prepared to write lab reports, speech outlines, projects, and more even within the first month
17) holy shit I can write
titsay
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
kianamaiart
amandla
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
romaincrisis
snowghoul
