This past week has been my last week of summer; I will be returning to school on Monday to start my senior year. It’s taken a full summer, but I’ve finally adjusted to the fact that I’m actually going to be a senior–nevertheless, my first days as a freshman from three years ago still feels like just a few months ago. Interestingly enough, though, I’ve spent more time this past week doing school stuff than anything else.

On Monday afternoon, I arranged for this year’s new Peace Club officers to get together at Starbucks in order to discuss stuff for the new year–goals, procedures, etc. I was actually there as an outgoing officer because I’m no longer the president of the club (though I still hold claim to the title of founding the club almost three years ago, not to mention that I’ll continue to be a member). The club has a new president who has a lot of new ideas, and it’s my hope that the club will keep going even after I graduate.

I am, however, a member of my school’s Leadership class this year. I probably should have joined the class a year or two ago, but my busy class schedule kind of prevented that from happening. This year I’m in the class, and even though my run for the slot of Student Body President last spring was unsuccessful, I’m still in and have jobs to do. They’ve actually given me a few responsibilities: I’m their representative to Aragon’s parent organization (which is no longer a PTSA, but since I still know the people and am familiar with the territory, I’m probably the best pick), one of their representatives to UASB (a group of representatives from the student bodies of all seven high schools in our district), and also going to be in charge of maintaining the new website that they want to put together this year. Leadership met twice this week–first for a few hours on Tuesday morning when we found out our responsibilities and did some getting to know each other activities, etc., and then on Wednesday morning, which was our school’s Freshman Orientation. In addition to helping to put on the orientation, we all got to lead tour groups throughout the school and answer other questions from the freshmen.

Yesterday, Thursday, ended up having me more involved in planning for the school year than I would have anticipated. You see, at this point, I’ve pretty much completed all of the math offered at my school. I did my first year of Algebra in 7th grade, Geometry in 8th grade, second year of Algebra in 9th grade, Pre-Calculus and AP Statistics simultaneously in 10th grade, and AP Calculus BC in 11th grade. I’ve got 40 math credits already on my transcript and no more math available at my school, so I was planning to take Calculus III, a semester continuation of Calculus, at the College of San Mateo in the morning for first semester only, and then transit down to Aragon for the rest of my classes the rest of the day. My classes would be Orchestra, AP Government/Economics, English, Biotech, Law & Society/Psychology, and Leadership.
However, my counselor called me up yesterday morning to give me some bad news: my schedule was impossible to put together. This was mostly due to the fact that so many of my classes were only available during single periods: my CSM math class had to be first period, Orchestra has to be second period, Leadership has to be fifth period, and Law & Society/Psychology has to be sixth period. That left third, fourth, and seventh periods for the other three classes, and none of them were offered during seventh. And so, after doing a lot of debate with myself and my parents, I ended up dropping that math class at CSM (after confirming that I could return the $125 textbook to the CSM Bookstore for a full refund), since in terms of its importance to my grade, my graduating credits, and my personal interests, it was probably the lowest priority. After all, I’ve already got 40 credits worth of math stashed up from the past three years, more than enough to graduate. It does completely change my plans for this school year, but unfortunately, that’s what you have to take when life throws it at you.

So hopefully the fact that I’ve been going through all this school stuff this past week means that my first week of school, next week, will be better and more painless than it has been in prior years.

Tags: CSM, freshmen, Leadership, math, meeting, orientation, Peace Club, Personal, schedule, School, summer

Well, for me, junior year is almost done, and with the closing out of junior year means the closing out of standardized college entrance exams. This year has been filled with quite a number of tests of various things, from PSAT to SAT to ACT to Subject Tests to AP exams to all of these other things. However, one of the more contentious debates between tests of this class is between the SAT and the ACT. Both are general-subject standardized college entrance exams, and are often said to “compete” between each other to be the test of choice. Well, now that I’ve prepared for, taken, and gotten scores for each of these exams, I thought that I’d take the opportunity to review them and offer my opinion on the one that I like better. (I do promise that although my scores differ a bit between the two exams, I am not considering how I scored on each exam in this review.)
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Tags: ACT, College Board, College Entrance Exam, English, essay, exam, math, reading, review, SAT, science, test, Writing

On Saturday, March 1st, I took my very first full-length SAT. (Technically called the SAT Reasoning Test.) I thought that I had done okay on it, though it is a very long (and stressful) test, particularly once you get to around section 7 or 8 and your brain starts to say “Enough already!”

However, my scores came out this morning at 8 AM Eastern time (a time which I’ve been counting down to over the past few days in anticipation), and so here they are (note that all scores fall within the 200-800 range):

Critical Reading: 630 (85th percentile)
Math: 710 (95th percentile)
Writing: 670 (93rd percentile)
–>In the Writing category, I receive subscores for multiple choice questions (between 20-80) and the 25-minute essay (between 2-12), in which I got 68 and 8 respectively.

This adds up to a cumulative sum of 2010 for the test (on the 600-2400 scale), which is a pretty good score, although not as high as I was hoping. Except for math, the scores are somewhat below the average scores for some of the top colleges that I’m looking at, although they’re not too far off. I’ll have to decide later whether I want to give this test another shot or not in the fall.

I do have some more tests on the way. I’ll be taking the ACT exam on Saturday, April 12th, and then two SAT Subject Tests on Saturday, May 3rd. We’ll see how well I do on those…

Tags: colleges, Critical Reading, essay, math, Reasoning, SAT, scores, test, Writing

Acqualia’s Soulver is a very unique calculator tool for Mac OS X. Say goodbye to the keypad and screen: this app uses a keyboard and two boxes. The idea is that Soulver is a calculator designed to work like a word processor. The screen shows two sections. On the left section, you type your query, and as you type, the right side will instantly update. If you type “21/3″ on the left side, without quotes, “7″ will appear on the right side. You can then go onto a new line to make a new calculation, but the previous calculation is still there, and you can go back and change this. This is SO much more useful than the paper tape of the traditional calculator.

However, Soulver even lets you forget the traditional style of numbers for calculations, because it works with English expressions. Type “half a million” on the left-hand side, and Soulver will correctly return 500,000. Type “My house is 5 ft by 4 ft”, and Soulver will return 20, which is the number of square feet your house is. Soulver even lets your set constants for a long drawn out question. If, for example, I write “cookies = $500 a cookie” on one line and “How much does 5 cookies cost?” on the next line, Soulver will return $2,500. It’s really intelligent!

Soulver also contains some additional features. It has an Answers palette, which floats so that you can see not just the decimal answer of the active line, but also the answer expressed in Root, Fraction, Degrees, Hex, and Binary. A statistics palette is also available which displays stats on all the numbers on the right-hand side, including their Total, Average, Median, Range, Minimum, and Maximum. Soulver also lets you save the current sheet of calculations you’re working on as a document that you can open again later, as well.

Soulver is, without a doubt, the definition of what a computer calculator should be. If you’ve ever been frustrated with Apple’s Calculator.app, give Soulver a try.

Final Rating:

Tags: calculator, Mac, math, review, Software