Sophomore Year Reflection

A collection of my thoughts on my sophomore year of high school as well as some notable projects.

Sophomore Year Reflection

This year (2021-2022) was definitely an easy academic year. I also decided to self-study AP Statistics and take the SAT along with my normal academic coursework to make things a little more challenging. The beginning of the year was definitely a huge change from remote schooling. I made friends and became acquainted with classmates, school was a lot more social. This year I chose fewer clubs to be involved in, compared to last year, only Math League (in which I was an officer) and Robotics. Since I was an officer, I created a new math league participation leaderboard (tinyurl.com/AITMathParticipation) and some new competition math practice presentations. I was also obligated to go to all of the math club meetings we had such as Math Madness, NJML, CJML, and other meetings. This time the AMC was in November so I didn’t have much time to prepare for it and I didn’t get a very good score.

Then near the end of the second marking period, I began using my free time to do SAT prep to prepare for my test in December. I was aiming for the 1550+ range so I was disappointed when I received my score, 1480 (I also took the PSAT but it wasn’t very significant) but it still was a really good score! Then over winter break, I tried to teach myself all of the AP Statistics coursework. I didn’t completely finish but the extra two weeks of “break” helped out and I planned to finish during Spring Break.

Then the third marking period started, probably the toughest one, it wasn’t too difficult academically but I had to do a lot of projects. In school, I had the American Dream Research Project in English, some Spanish Presentations, CSP coding projects, and a history project. Also, Robotics Build Season started so I also had to work on programming the robot. This year I did a lot of work for the Robotics team, I coded three subsystems, created PathWeaver paths, and tried working on some Limelight vision applications. Our team did fairly well this season and I went to a bunch of our competitions. While this was going on, I decided to take the SAT once more in March, so I began preparing for that as well. In March I did better, I got 1510, but I still wasn’t near my dream score. By this time I decided that I should focus on AP prep, so I did a bunch of AP Statistics practice tests and frqs. After the exam, I felt confident in how I did. The other exams were a breeze and hopefully, I get 5s in all of them. UPDATE: I did

After this, I was told that I qualified for ARML, so I began doing some more competition math prep. As I began practicing, I realized that I probably wasn’t going to do very well at ARML. I knew that there were a lot of exams and projects coming up, since it was near the end of the year, and I probably shouldn’t spend a lot of time trying to get better at competition math. So I decided that I would go to ARML to have fun, and indeed it was fun. I really enjoyed going to Penn State, exploring the campus, and listening to a guest lecture by Po-Shen Loh. It was a great experience and I will probably try to get better at competition math to ensure I get to go again next year.

All in all, this year was pretty great. This year was full of fun and new experiences. Onward to 11th grade!

Classes

• Principles of Business and Finance
• AP Computer Science Principles
• Chemistry
• Early American Literature
• AP Calculus BC
• Spanish III
• Gym/Health
• US History I

Principles of Business and Finance

Reflection

The largest project in my Principles of Business plan was the business plan. I put a lot of effort into creating this business plan for AccuCrops. After completing the basic parts of the plan, I spent most of my time working on the financial aspects of the business because this was the part of the business plan I was most interested in. Because of the limits on presentation time and pdf length, I was not able to include all of the work I did in my slideshow and business plan (I went overtime even after this). Overall. I really enjoyed this project because of the process I followed to achieve these final products. Throughout the project, I found myself researching things that I had never even heard about. These tangents added to my knowledge of the PASS industry and the market as a whole. Additionally, I got to use numbers and statistics in a real life scenario. My favorite part of this project was the huge Google Sheet I made to organize the information I found. The experience that this project gave me will definitely help me if I wish to create a business in the future.

AP Computer Science Principles

Reflection

Dr. Wiener is the best Computer Science teacher I’ve ever had. His classes were my favorite because he gave us time to work on our own projects to practice our programming skills. I appreciated this because most of Computer Science Principles is basic digital literacy and our entire class was already certified in IC3 Digital Literacy. This class gave us the opportunity to learn more about programming and prepare us for our future computer science courses.

Also I got a 5 on the AP exam.

Projects

I made a bunch of programs for this course and these ones are for assignments in the course. For all of my programs, I went above and beyond to include additional features that I thought would complement the program well and practice my own skills. My favorite program was the customizable math quiz because it allowed me to use math and computer science at the same time. My favorite part of the project was creating a function to generate random mathematical equations and their answers.

I hope you have as much fun using them as I had making them!

Chemistry

Reflection

I enjoyed this class much more than Biology. This was partly because it was in-person which allowed us to do labs. These labs were really cool; we saw different colored flames, gas in bubbles exploding, sodium and potassium metal reacting in water, and elephant toothpaste. This class was also a lot more interesting than Biology. I really enjoyed the labs in class. However, there was a lot of self-studying in this class. Although I was able to keep up, a lot of people needed help on things during class. I tried helping them to the best of my ability to help us all through the class.

That’s my head at the front row!

Early American Literature

Reflection

This project was my favorite English project ever. This research project introduced me to study planning and execution. I was also able to use my Sheets and Statistics skills to learn more about Economic Inequality in cities in New Jersey. This application of the skills I had been learning the entire year gave me more practical knowledge of the use of Sheets and Statistics in the real world. Along with this slideshow, I made a huge Google Sheet of all the New Jersey data I collected. This document included a lot more charts that I didn’t have time to use. Like my previous presentations, I nearly ran overtime because I had so much information to include.

AP Calculus BC

Reflection

Before I entered this class, I already had a lot of experience in AP Calculus BC because I was interested in this course and decided to self-teach myself AP Calculus BC. I asked to take the final exam to test myself and I got around a 50%. With this score, I felt confident that I learned half of the content in Calculus BC. Mr. Weisser was also a great Calculus teacher, in my opinion, the best math teacher that has every taught me. He really cares about his students and is a great teacher. I had a lot of fun in this math class.

The AP exam went well and I got a 5

Projects

My final project was a project that incorporates calculus into a STEAM related field. For my project, I decided to make a customization math test for Calculus. Since I had already created a Customizable Math test, I decided to reuse it to incorporate calculus. For the calculus I decided not to use a library for the calculus (which I would program myself). This project took a really long time to complete.

This is the longest program I have ever written.

I hope you have fun!

Spanish III

Reflection

Here are some of the presentations my group-mate and I made about the Galapagos Islands and La Bomba. I really enjoyed these presentations because it allowed us to practice both presenting and Spanish speaking skills. We were also able to use our PowerPoint skills to create an effective presentation to show to our class. These presentations were my favorite Spanish projects because they were like any other project we would do, but in Spanish. I really enjoyed this style of learning Spanish speaking skills. I really enjoyed this class as a whole and I feel like I recovered some of the learning I lost in Spanish due to online school.

Gym/Health

Reflection

The past two years I have really missed Gym class. It’s the only class in the school day that is not academically rigorous and gives students a chance to cool down after a long day. I particularly missed the opportunity that Gym gave for us to physically play with my friends. Of the many activities we particpated in, Volleyball was my favorite activity because it was a team game even though I wasn’t very good at it. Then in the last marking period, we participated in Project Adventure. At the beginning we mostly played trust building activities (my favorite was the one in which one person was blind folded and the other had to guide the other using verbal commands to pick and throw balls at others) but later on we moved to climbing. I learned some important life-skills in our climbing lessons such as tying knots, belaying, untying knots, and climbing. I feel like I learned a lot more from Gym class this year compared to previous years because of Project Adventure.

US History I

Reflection

This was my Mountain Man Project and we were tasked with creating a diorama of the Gold Rush. I decided to create a working model of Hydraulic Mining. I could have easily just made a 3d model of a mountain and color it in but I was actually interested in how this type of mining worked. As you can see, it has sand which represents dirt and heavy plastic beads that represent gold. There is a bottle with a drawing of a hose that represents the water source. This bottle can be used to spray the mountain to catch the gold in the sluice at the bottom. I enjoyed researching and building the project at the same time. I really want to do something like this in the future.

Also, History class was great with Mr. Shapiro.