Use Your Free Time by Alex

Use Your Free Time by Alex - March 2019 Scholarship Essay

As an incoming freshman I would like to give you some advice that helped me get through high school. If you have a break during school, whether it be work time in class, time before or after school, or an off period. By doing this I have managed to only have a few nights over my high school career that I was up late doing school work even with all my activities.
During class a lot of the time you might finish what the teachers ask you to do early or they just run out of lesson plan for the time they have and you are just sitting there with no current work. This is a perfect time to bring out smaller quick assignments and mark those off your checklist and if you do this 2 time a class period you can finish almost 16 small tasks over the course of the school day and not have all of those after school to do as homework. This works only if you put in the mental effort to do it, for example if you try to make sure you are in a class where you have friends you probably won’t do this but that can be helpful because than you can spend time with your friends after school for more time instead of during class and not getting ahead on your work.
If you get to school early or have after school activities that don’t start directly after school this is a great time to get things like a reading or short answer done because you have enough time to sit down and focus but not too much to complete a project. A lot of people will try to go home or show up late to not be at school that much but if you take advantage of this time and do the work at school your house stops feeling like a second school place and more of a place to relax. These medium size assignments are what can start taking up a lot of time after school because they are busy work but do take mental energy to complete; and if you complete them at school you can either be awake and more capable of doing them after school or you can wake your brain up in the morning to be more focused during school.
Off periods are a way that the school system is giving you a lifeline to make sure you don’t drown in your school work and are also able to participate in all the extra activities that colleges like to see. This time is great to work on those projects and get large chunks of them complete and reduce the stress you would have of staying up late that night and losing sleep into the next day. There are some projects that will require you to work on them at home but if you take advantage of the time you are given than you can make a 5 page paper a 2 page paper to complete at home instead of all 5 and that is much easier to fit into a time slot of after school before bed. You should also use your off periods to relax though too, if you don’t have a lot of work to complete and you feel it is manageable at home than think about going out and taking a long lunch break during your time or just relaxing and watch a video; because if you are always working than you will forget how to relax and will just start becoming more stressed with all the new things you are assigned.
The workload in high school is definitely more than what you are used to, but it is manageable as long as you stay on top of the time that others won’t. The ones who complain about work time are the ones who always take breaks during their free time instead of being smart about their breaks. It takes some time to get comfortable with how long it takes to manage everything but you can as long as you stay proactive and menatlly realize how much time you have and take advantage of that time others might be wasting.