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How Taking A High School Elective Changed My Life

Lessons I learned from my high school newspaper class that I still carry with me — and how you can use them too

It was a seemingly innocuous decision at the time.

I was a sophomore in high school, and I had already chosen 5 out of my 6 classes for my junior year. They were mainly a mix of AP math and science courses like calculus and physics.

Now I had to decide on my last elective. I narrowed my decision down to either AP Environmental Science (I’d heard it was easy and it counted as another AP Science credit for college) or the school newspaper class (get to be on the school newspaper staff, write articles, etc.).

To be honest, I didn’t know much about the school newspaper at the time other than that the kids who wrote for it got to spend a period wandering around school and interviewing teachers, students, etc. for articles. They got a “press pass” that granted them special permissions and access. I thought it sounded like a pretty sweet gig, though.

My academic side told me to go for the easy AP science class for my transcript, especially since I had skipped out on a few APs my freshman and sophomore years. I could always use the GPA boost.

I asked my dad for advice. Coming from an Asian household, I assumed he would tell me to go for the AP class.

His answer surprised me. He told me to sign up for the newspaper.

When I asked him why, he told me I would spend the next many years learning about science but I might not get the chance to write for a publication, even if it’s just a high school newspaper. Who knows, I may even end up liking it.

I had never written before, but I had read avidly as a kid. I also had pipe dreams of writing one day, but nothing concrete. I was surprised to hear him say that, and so I took his advice and I went for it.

Turned out it was some of the best advice I ever got.

I was right in my earlier observations about the newspaper class. When I joined, it was a smattering of lower and upperclassmen, all the way from freshmen to seniors. I had never taken a class like it before. Up until that point, every class I had been in had the same kids I had known for years. This was the first time I was getting to meet kids in other grades in a class.

We turned out to get to know each other really well, and I ended up becoming really close with everyone on the staff. That’s what happens when you bond over interviewing teachers and pulling out friends for articles. It’s what happens when you stress over meeting article deadlines together.

It’s what happens when you can look at a physical, tangible copy of something you’ve collectively spent hundreds of hours working on for the last few weeks and be proud of holding something in your hands with your name on it. It’s what happens when you have to stand in the middle of the busy hallway in your high school at 7 AM, bleary-eyed and half-asleep with a stack of hundreds of your school’s newest issue of the newspaper hot off the press, and annoy hundreds of your friends and groggy classmates by standing in their path to their first class.

You start to bond with these people, people who you probably never would have otherwise met in a school of 3200 students.

Soon, they became some of my closest friends. I would turn to the upperclassmen for advice on applying to college and I doled out some advice of my own on a few occasions.

Fast forward a few years, and I was yet again making another decision about what extracurriculars to get involved in as a wide-eyed freshman at the University of Georgia.

This time, though, my decision was a little more straightforward and directed. I knew I wanted to get involved with another publication.

I ended up writing and editing for some, including The Red and Black, the Georgia Political Review, and PreMed Magazine, to name a few.

Fast forward another few years, and I’m writing here on Medium. All from that one decision that I made many years ago, to take a high school newspaper elective over an AP class. Looking back now, I can say with certainty: I sure am glad I made the right decision.

So the next time you are faced with a seemingly minor decision in your life (at the time), pay heed to the potential consequences. Maybe you could sign up for a writing or Python course instead of something more in your comfort zone.

It could very well be that you end up choosing something that you end up enjoying, or something you didn’t even know you had a passion for. I did, and it brought me here.

Enjoyed reading this article? Follow me on Medium! I’m a medical student from Atlanta, Georgia interested in writing, health disparities, and clinical research.