3 for 4

Well, it happened. The decision from MIT came today. As expected I got a message saying that I was not accepted. At the same time, I won't deny that I wished that I would get in so I could show off, but that just wasn't allowed for me. It seems that I'm probably head to Georgia tech if all goes well for me, now. Sorry Tomy and Anh. At least I don't have to be regretful that I didn't go to MIT after being accepted.

In other news, my mom learned today that I actually know a guy on YouTube. Well, I used to know him, but no longer be cause he's a bit too famous now. If you don't know Victor Kim, I'm sure you've seen him at some point hanging out on the nigahiga channel or the YTF channel. He's amazing at dancing and is pretty good at singing as well. I'm surprised I had never remembered him. I kind of remember the name, but it had never occurred to me that I knew him when I was younger.

Well... that was a short run

Hmm... two days straight was the last run that I had. That's a bit disappointing. Well, I'll go ahead and write some things about how I am so far. I'm sure you don't really care, but I mostly write for myself anyways. By the way, I have a little less than 2 hours to write this because I promised a friend that I would write something today. Along with that, he told me to write fat, sexy paragraphs... I don't really know how to do that, so I'll just go ahead and write as I usually do.

College news so far:
3 for 3! I've been accepted to Georgia Tech, University of Southern California, and Virginia Tech. I'm thinking of going to GT, but if Sam doesn't receive enough monies, Sam may have to go elsewhere. As unfortunate as that would be, I'm just glad that I haven't been rejected from a school yet. Unfortunately, tomorrow, Pi Day, at 6:28PM, I will, most likely, be rejected from MIT, so stay tuned. I might just go ahead and write about my thoughts after that experience. Along with that, I'll be at taekwondo right after learning whether or not I got in, so that will be a way to let out any negative emotions that I may feel after learning of my rejection. I understand that I have no chance of getting in, but for some reason, I think that I'll still be a bit unhappy after learning of my rejection. That's how positive I'm feeling about colleges so far. I believe UPenn has decisions on the 28th as well, so that will be fun.

School related things:
English is not as bad as I imagined it was going to be. The worst things for me are harknesses, which are basically where the class talks about the novel that was just finished, because I just have trouble thinking of what to comment on or how to reply to questions directed at me. Talking is just a challenge for me and I don't really know why. Also, I have these reading logs for every book that I read, one of which happens to be due tomorrow, where I have to write down my feelings as I read the book. Currently we are reading Heart of Darkness, which I've heard is a challenging read. I didn't think it was that bad, but after I finished reading, I checked the SparkNotes (shame on me) to see if I properly understood the book and I was completely off. I though that Marlow was a posh dude who really didn't like the black people in Africa, but it turns out that he just refers to them in that way because of the people he is hanging out with. I guess he just doesn't want to be seen as being too strange? Anyway, I'm going to have to get back to that log after this.

AP Economics. I have to say that of all the classes that I've taken in high school, this has got to be the worst. The teacher doesn't teach and instead tells us to read the book. Just like Dr.Felts, except that this class actually counts as a full grade not just part of another class grade. Ugh. The structure of the class is supposed to be that there is a chapter every week in an online textbook that we are supposed to read. Then, we are supposed to do some problems out of the online book and turn them in. After that, the teacher is supposed to give feedback on these and from that feedback, we are then supposed to do the problem set that she gives us. Unfortunately, what ultimately occurs is that she assigns all the work, we turn in the chapter review on or before Sunday. She doesn't grade them at all. We turn in the problem set on Tuesday and finally get results back on Wednesday for the chapter review. Then on the following days we get the results back from the Problem Set. We don't have any extra credit and the only thing that keeps us from getting B's and C's is the Reflection and the Open Forum. These are just little discussion things that the teacher has that are 20 points each. Tests and Problem sets kill my grade, but that's fine. I'll figure out micro and macro alone at home the weeks before the test. This class doesn't help me at all.

AP Chem is getting better, I'm understanding it more and it's getting a bit easier. APES... is just a bunch of work, but I'm learning everything, which is never bad.

I'm going to go ahead and abruptly end this because I have to finish this reading long. As I said before, I'll try and remember to update tomorrow on my MIT decision.

Beginning to explain

Let me start explaining. My college applications finished around December 30th. My goodness, that was a relief. Without applications to have to worry about, I started to focus a little more in classes. The problem after that, though, was that I didn't really have any motivation to do anymore volunteering. I felt really bad after realizing that; in fact, I still feel bad because volunteering is supposed to be just giving up time to help out the community and after it became less of a necessity for college, I stopped wanting to do it. I hope that it's just a side effect of both getting all my applications in and getting into a college, but I get the feeling that it may just be a Sam thing. A natural state of being Sam is one where he just doesn't want to volunteer. Sigh, I really should fix that.
Anyway, I managed to get into USC! I'm really glad because I was beginning to get worried that I wouldn't get into colleges. One of my friends had actually gotten deferred from both Georgetown and JMU, so I was getting nervous, but USC made me relieved. Now I just have to keep my grades up to the point that I can stay salutatorian/ tied valedictorian with my buddy.
I think that's enough for today, more explanation shall be written tomorrow.

-Sam Rho

I haven't written here in a while..

I forgot about this... Totally should have written on here earlier... Like a few months earlier. Well, since the last post, many things have happened. College applications have all been finish, the past semester has been completed, new classes have begun, many gifts have been exchanged, Sam has actually been accepted into one college, Sam has purchased Minecraft, Microeconomics has begun in the online class, Sam has discovered that English isn't as challenging as he expected, and Sam has started listening to a few different podcasts.

I think I may actual start writing on here again as a bit of practice for ap english. After all, writing more helps to become a better reader, and that is a skill that I really need to work on. Understanding literature is a very challenging task, at least to me. These changes since the last post will be discussed in future posts.

-Sam Rho

A lesson learned

This is an essay that my cousin helped me to brainstorm about.

Another test was passed back and a round of groans went up from many my classmates. I hadn’t done very well on this test either, barely getting a B on it. This was the third test this year and still no one had been able to get higher than a 90% on them. This was the average life of a student taking Calculus I at Mountain Vista Governor’s School. Although we were supposed to be the brightest students out of all of our schools, we were still getting average grades. Something needed to be done.
Many of the students thought that it wasn’t enough to simply go to class and listen to the teacher. I, at first as a joke, suggested that we all meet up at my house to attempt to teach ourselves. Many of the students actually agreed, completely seriously, so my address was distributed among the students and that weekend, I was surprised to see a large group of my peers outside my front door. I hadn’t expected so many people to show up, but I assumed that everyone wanted a good grade and was going to do everything in their power to achieve that.
We started slowly, reviewing the basic things like the definition of a derivative and the power rule, but as the weeks continued, we were able to learn much more in the same amount of time. Some of us learned better by hearing exactly how each concept went, other people learned better by reading the material out loud to themselves, so we tried putting those people together. Other people learned the material better by writing it out, so we provided much paper for them. By taking advantage of the learning strengths of each of the students, we were able to really understand Calculus better.
In the weeks that followed, the people who had come to the study groups weren’t groaning at their grades, but were looking happy. Even I saw many tests coming back with high A’s! Many weeks passed and the AP tests approached. The students in the class who had not come to the study sessions were beginning to panic and were doing last minute studying, but those who were in the study group felt confident in their abilities to pass the exam.
Towards the end of July, when AP scores came out, the Governor’s School students shared their scores with each other and there was a large difference between the scores of those who had gone to the study group and those who hadn’t. Most of the students who had gone to the study group had managed to get at least a 4 on the exam, while many of those who hadn’t participated in the study group had barely pulled off 3’s. From that experience, I realized that sometimes, going alone wasn’t always the way to go. Sometimes collaboration could be much better than being independent. Even a challenging class like Calculus was overcome through collaboration, and that experience made this lesson clear to me. The following year of Governor’s School, we were already planning to meet again at my house for the study group.

I'm sure it's not that good because I'm not the best writer, so I would love constructive criticism.

-Sam Rho

Autodidacticism

That's probably not the right word, but I figured I would write about how I feel right now in AP Chemistry. Considering how long it's been since I last wrote, I probably should have some sort of update as well on life.

It's been about a month since school started and I have barely learned anything in AP Chemistry class. My teacher... Really the only thing that she's almost taught me is a couple anions. That's only because we had a test on it everyday, so we had to quickly learn all the names and the elements that made up the compounds. Instead of learning from the teacher, I've ha to teach myself. It almost feels like I'm back in AP Calculus with Hess, except it's worse because I don't really know Chemistry and it's actually challenging. I hope this AP book actually helps, otherwise, I'm screwed. Also, I get the fun of taking the Chemistry SOL this year. Remember those? I didn't know they still existed, but apparently I have to take the test for Chemistry. That'll be fun. Also, AP Economics is a similar situation, but there's the excuse that the teacher is kinda in Texas, so whatever. All of us in the class have to teach ourselves.

Oh, small update on everything. I get to do some more applications. My mom said I should apply to more schools, so I have a Stanford application, University of Illinois application, Caltech application, and I think I may have to do some UC schools as well. That'll be fun.

My attempt at writing something

I don't really know what this is. I attempted to write something for a college app, but I can't even use this. I can probably use some of this, but I have to reword it a bunch. Anyway, I think I've figured out what I should probably do in order to get better at writing these essays. I'm going to have to write like a Simon. Basically show off and make myself seem really awesome, but not to the point where I am Simon. I want to still be somewhat humble. Finding the perfect balance of these things... is probably going to be very challenging, especially with my extreme lack of writings skills. Oh well, I hope I can figure out the best way for me to write soon. If you decide to read what's below, you're awesome!

            I have never really understood myself. My parents told me I was born with a heart defect, the kind where you lack an entire third of your heart. That was the story I knew and I had never questioned it. To people that my parents told the story of my birth to, I was the miracle child. I guess that made sense, most people don’t live with a third of a heart, at least not for long. Still, I had only heard about how I lived, never really asking a doctor about how I was living. It wasn’t until recently that my parents had actually told me I had gotten the Fontan procedure. Sure, I had heard them talk about it to my cardiologist, and I had figured out that the procedure had been what had allowed me to live, but my own parents had never told me about my own life until that day.

As a young child, I seemed to enjoy games very much. From the moment I laid eyes on the Nintendo 64, I knew I had to get one. Again, though, that’s just from what my parents told me. I know I did enjoy being able to play with the game system, but I don’t exactly know when or even how I managed to learn about it. The only sources I have from those years are other people, my parents, perhaps other relatives, but not me. This excitement that I got from playing games led to me getting even more game systems and more games! I was just amazed at how quickly new devices and games were coming out. My parents always seem to forget to mention how much money each of those systems cost and how much they had to work in order to get that money. Of course, as a child, I had never really thought about that, I just wanted to play the new Gamecube or Gameboy. Perhaps I might have been more grateful that I was at the time if I had learned about those things.

            My childhood, what did I do back then? I wouldn’t remember things like that; most of the exciting things my parents mention are things that I can only find in pictures. Sure, they show me the pictures and I attempt to remember, but the memories just don’t seem to exist anymore. I don’t remember eating a watermelon papaya or even remotely remember how I used to wash myself with spaghetti. The pictures show my past, but that past is one that I just can’t seem to find in my own mind. These days, there are things I see that make me feel nostalgic, as if I had actually watched Doraemon or Zzangu on television, but that can’t be true. I’ve been in the United States and things like that are only in Asian countries. I really confuse myself sometimes.

-Sam Rho