What's the best tip you could give to someone starting secondary school?

If you want to go far in your education and in life, I suggest a number of things. Lets start out by saying that if this is bait, ya got me. If you will follow my advice you will go far, you will need to sacrifice true friendships and other distractions like anything social. If you are able to maintain a social life while still doing all that follows, you are either bullshitting, getting bad grades, or both.

Once you start secondary school, you want to immediately meet your guidance counselor. I mention this because a proper introduction with a formal feel to it goes a long way to show that you mean business. You will need to establish face value for your guidance counselor because he is in charge of getting you into classes that you might not otherwise get in to. When you pick your classes for secondary school, go with the absolute hardest classes that are available. All AP or IB if possible. If you messed something up in your course selection, at the beginning of the first year of secondary school you should talk to your guidance counselor to get you into the right classes. Once these growing pains are done with you should learn everything there is to know about that secondary school in the sense of their curriculum and how they go about normal pace for students. Once you learn the normal pace for students, you forget all of it and create your own based on the bare bones of what you learned is allowed by your school. If there is online school, take the maximum courses that are applicable to you while you are in your first year of school. You will need to max out again as soon as you finish which should be at most that following summer break, and you should finish those classes that summer. You need to understand that if there is a possibility of taking online courses over the summer before secondary school, do it. If you choose not to, its ok, it will be the last summer you enjoy. Summary of first year up to the first summer. Max out required online courses over the summer before school starts. Take the hardest required courses available (AP or IB). Speak to numerous if not all of your schools organizations and get involved with most of them, not the bullshit ones like SADD and make sure you go to every event. Get involved with at least 2 teams, preferably ones that are closely related (i.e. track and cross country), and if you don't like sports, you're SOL because you should be the best by the end of the year. Take online courses while in school and then more while in the first summer between year one and year two. Get perfect grades, and avoid making enemies, just mind your own business and greet individuals that are important to your won path, fuck everyone else.

The following year you should talk to your guidance counselor and tell him that you took those courses over the summer and that you should be moved into higher level courses. You should now be in courses with upperclassmen. Take those courses and continue the perfect scores. At this point you should start studying for the SAT and ACT and 2 SAT subject tests (SAT II). You should focus on being the best one in the teams that you chose and the most involved in the clubs and organizations that you chose. At the end of this year you should receive letters from other organizations asking you to join. Join them and do the same as before, dominate. As soon as you start the second semester, sign up for Harvard summer courses, if you don't have the money, find a way of just go with online courses again. Summary, Maintain dominance in all aspects of academics. Grow in the clubs and organizations you are in (by this I mean get a leadership position/become an officer). Become the vice captain or captain of your teams and ensure that you maintain dominance. Take the PSAT after studying for the SAT and ACT and achieve a 230 or higher. Take as many more tests as you need (i.e. AMC etc.). That summer you should go to Harvard to take summer courses for credit and at the same time take online summer courses while you are at Harvard.

The following years you need to recycle. I mean that you should keep the momentum and continue to take more and more leadership positions available, and do not make anyone aware of what you are doing. Dominate Student government and other important organizations. Take over other sports and make more acquaintances. Make friends with your teachers at this point. Take more summer courses at Harvard and continue your perfect scores in AP and IB courses, finish all requirements to graduate (although you should have finished all of them by the end of the second year). Get within the top 97.5 percentile of your SAT score, meaning close to perfect. same for ACT and other tests. Make sure you take other tests like the AMC and continue forward onto the AIME USAMO, USAPhO, USACO, or more top well know competitions like the Intel STS, IMO, IPhO, IChO, IBO and IOAA to name a few, make sure that you establish your future goals from day one and let others know, in a subtle manner that all you want is the better of the human race or that you want to help people. Make it look like you care and make it correlate to the goals you have set.

I cannot tell you what to expect for your fourth year, make sure that everyone puts you at a God Tier level and never brag or boast, because it makes you look bad. At the end of these years you should be able to maintain all that I've mentioned with little to no effort.

When you decide which college you want to go to, just know that you can get in to any school you could ever imagine. so don't go to Community college or any state school, go for higher level schools looking for a higher goal, take any of the HYPSM (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT).

After this, even though you worked your ass off, there is no stopping this momentum and you have passed the POR so there is no turning back. just keep moving forward.

TL;DR If you don't take the time to read it, you will become the scum of this world that I am trying to avoid you from becoming. Don't make that mistake.

/r/AskReddit Thread