"Remember. You create your own reality."| A Virginia Tech Student on HS Courses

We had the great opportunity of interviewing Joshita Padala, a student from Virginia Tech about: High School Courses Here are some of her qualifications: Education Junior chair in the Association for Women in Computing at Virginia Tech Public Relations chair for the VT Science Olympiad Majoring in Computer Science Here are some important words she shares " I looked at the outcome for those classes. I saw how each class benefitted my future career. " " I definitely had multiple teachers in high school that were not putting the effort, so I would just take matters into my own hands and use different resources to learn the content by myself. " Q: If you had to choose between two classes that you both wanted, how did you decide? A: I l ooked at the outcome for those classes. I saw how each class benefitted my future career . One class may be needed for me to succeed in my field of engineering while the other may help now but not in the long run, and that is the one I didn’t pick. Q: How did you handle teachers that weren’t putting effort into their job or didn’t have the knowledge to teach a course? A: That is when you have to bring your individuality out ! For the rest of your life, especially in college, you aren’t going to have teachers that spoon feed you all the information you need to know. Teachers will oftentimes give you 50% of the information, while you have to research and find the other 50% in order to do well. I definitely had multiple teachers in high school that were not putting the effort, so I would just take matters into my own hands and use different resources to learn the content by myself. Q: How did you decide what courses to take? (interest, GPA, college credit, etc.) A: During Freshman and Sophomore years, one of the main factors was interest . But as I got to junior and senior year, I would research to see what types of courses different colleges were looking for and I picked based on that. Q: How did you keep track of your work and assignments? A: One method that mainly works for me is to carry around a planner. As the week started, I would write everything in the planner, and the simple task of crossing things out when finished would bring me so much satisfaction and enable me to work harder to finish everything. Q: How did you determine if you had studied all you could for a test or if you had completed an assignment to the best of your ability? A: Practice, practice, practice! I would just find multiple practice tests online and take them until I could get all the questions right . When I would get something wrong, I knew that there was some information that I did not learn or did not understand correctly so I would review it again. Q: Which AP classes did you find most difficult? A: This is definitely different for every student, but for me AP World History was the most difficult because personally I did not like learning about history. Q: Did you set a limit for the number of AP classes you would take? A: No, I did not set a limit, but I also did not want to overwhelm myself. Q: What did you have to sacrifice in high school in order to do well academically? A: My favorite thing to do was to watch TV shows and movies, but after starting high school, and the workload started to increase, I knew that I could use that time to study and do well instead. Q: How did you do in AP courses qualitatively and quantitatively? A: Most of them, qualitatively and quantitatively, I did well. As mentioned before, although I ended up with good grades and AP scores, I didn't enjoy the history ones. And that really depends student to student because I had friends who loved the history AP’s. Learn more about Joshita and her experience on her LinkedIn account. Think you know someone or are someone that can give some advice? Fill out this form here ! Have more questions based on what you’ve read? Submit them here !