Finding What's Best For You

Procrastination is one problem that plagues every student. No matter who you are or what grade you are, there’s no denying that we’ve all told ourselves, “Okay, I’ll start in an hour” before starting a homework assignment. And it’s understandable! Studying isn’t always fun; sometimes it’s tedious and feels like a chore that we have to get over with, leading to the inevitable cycle of procrastination. It’s not always a bad thing, but constant procrastination often results in even more unnecessary stress in the long run.

The 10th grade Student Council representatives have been working to address this issue. As sophomores prepare to enter the IB Diploma Program, time management is ever important when handling academics, extracurriculars, and all of the other commitments that come with entering IBDP. “We’ve noticed that procrastination and poor time-management is a large cause of stress amongst current tenth graders,” tenth-grade president Jessica Shin said. “If sophomores continue this way, it’ll be even harder for them in such a rigorous program like IBDP.”

“That’s why we decided to collaborate with a club called Stress Zero to potentially make the lives of tenth-graders, and hopefully eventually all students, easier as whole,” Jessica said. Stress Zero is a high school club whose primary goal is to alleviate stress for students, through both short term and long term solutions. The club has hosted movie nights and a dalgona event since it began this year in order to take students’ minds off of their stressful lives. “In terms of long-term solutions, campaigns like What’s Best For You work to address the root causes of stress amongst students.”

For example, a big problem that the tenth-grade representatives noticed was that students just didn’t find studying fun--at all. “In order to combat this, we worked with Stress Zero and created presentations to recommend effective study and time management methods,” Jessica said. “But of course, we didn’t just reintroduce generic methods that everybody knows. We also introduced concepts like ‘planned procrastination’ as well as ‘how to make studying fun.”

The goal of the first and only presentation hosted was to introduce ways to make studying fun. “If you’re going to study anyways, why not make it just a little bit more tolerable?” By matching your study and time-management methods with your personality (i.e. a student liked collecting things, so he uses study timer apps related to collecting plants), it may make studying seem less like a boring chore.

“We hope that in the future, we’re able to expand this to everybody else. Not only sophomores entering IBDP, but also upcoming 9th and 10th graders,” Jessica said. “Receiving study advice from actual students is definitely a lot more effective than listening to adults. So by having upperclassmen describe what worked for them, underclassmen may get some ideas about how they can find ‘what’s best for them’.”

It’s exciting to see more and more student initiatives like this pop up. Hopefully through campaigns like “What’s Best For You?” all students will be able to prosper in school. “Only you know what truly works for you,” Jessica said. “Our ultimate goal is that through this campaign, everybody will discover their fullest potential. And one can’t truly discover that without doing what’s best for them and having fun along the way.”