By: Sofia Turek

Recently, I typed, “I don’t care if I stop playing Grass Cutting Incremental (a game on Roblox) for a week.”.

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This seemed rather rapid, but it started with a French syllabus I got this year, an independent project, and taking AP Biology.

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Before this transition, I thought, “How do I grow out of Roblox?”. After, I realized I kind of did.

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On the first day of school, Mr. Hines warned me that “freshman year was a freebie year. Sophomore year is a year of transition.”. Later, I had stricter syllabi than last year.

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My French syllabus said that I should speak French as much as possible. I interpreted this as “You should get distracting obsessions out of your head so that you could speak French.”. I had one of those distracting obsessions, made rules for them, and put them in a song.

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A few days later, I realized that this obsession isn’t bad in itself. It’s the severity of the frenzies distracting me from school. I have already started gradually reducing it. One way I did this was to focus super hard on other stuff and independent projects.

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One of those independent projects is me arranging a song in gibberish that has never been arranged before to address a self-help scam. I’m super focused on it almost every night. The song gets in my head often.

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It serves as a warmup for an a cappella group I’m planning called CODES, which publishes long songs in gibberish to mimic the scam without the claims that the song will heal your depression. It combines a lot of my interests: linguistics, music, and being against disinformation.

 

An independent project like this is a passion project. It’s never too early to start one. I played games just because I had nothing to do. A passion project is worth more of your time and could be great for your college resume.

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I enrolled in AP Biology because I’m interested in science and want a challenge. Like the independent projects, AP Biology is something else for me to invest time in. It fits my level academically and in maturity. I understand all the content of the class, have a lot of homework, but it's manageable!