In my last Survival Guide, I talked about your parents and your significant other. I hope you took what I said to heart and if so, listen to my next few pieces of advice. Anything I say is intended to help you and just to inform you what I wish I had known at your age. Maybe if I had known, my life would be a lot easier right about now.
I know teens get tired of hearing this stuff from adults, so they just brush it off and don’t really listen. Hopefully, with me being closer to your age, maybe I can get through to you.
3. Grades are important.
I know your grades may not seem very important right now, but you don’t want to feel overwhelmed your senior year because you have an awful GPA and little to no chance of going to college, especially with a scholarship. Freshman year grades count, and they do make a huge difference.
Don’t be like a lot of students who wait until their junior year to start caring, like someone I know. Oops! I wish I had cared before then. Maybe now I wouldn’t have to start at a community college and go on from there to the University of Alabama.
Don’t just have good grades to make your parents happy, do it for you so you can be successful in the future. Believe it or not, four years is not a long time, and in 20 years, I don’t think you still want to be living with your mom and dad, do you?
Whenever I’m 30 or so, I envision myself in a nice house with my husband and hopefully a few small children while working as a private investigator. If you don’t go to college, the chances of you finding a good paying job is pretty slim.
Really, you’re not supposed to have to live on minimum wage. It is next to impossible for an adult with children to live comfortably on minimum wage. Jobs like McDonald’s and fast food are supposed to be for teenagers; but (I swear I am not bashing any adults that work fast food) adults are working them, too. In this economy, I can guarantee they don’t have everything they probably want, and if they have kids, it will be 100 times harder to support them. They probably won’t be around them as much because they’ll have to work so much harder and so much longer just to put food on the table.
Grades matter, even as a freshman.
4. Friends come and go.
I know you probably won’t believe me now, but the truth is, people grow apart and that includes friends. I had a friend that I had been best friends with since kindergarten, and last year we just stopped talking out of no where. Nothing. It was probably my fault, really. I felt like she was too immature, even though she was literally only five days younger than me. But I started to care about grades, college, and my future, and I felt like all she still cared about was boys and partying.
I miss her. I’ll admit that. We planned on going to college together, raising our children to be best friends just like us, and making fun of the stupid things our husbands did behind their back. It’s weird to think that won’t happen anymore. I miss how close we were. But I know I can’t get that back now.
That’s not to say everyone doesn’t stay friends after high school. My mom’s old high school friends still call and try to hang out with her all of the time, but it’s hard.
My mom told me a long time ago about the friends that “weren’t good for me,” and I ignored her. Now most of the people she warned me about, I refuse to talk t0, because they proved my mother right.
According to Uptown Magazine there are six simple ways to tell if your friend is a real friend.
1. They’re always competing with you.
If you do something, they always have to do something bigger and better. You get a new pair of shoes, they get a new pair… besides theirs are nicer, cooler, and 10 times more expensive.
2. They’re always gossiping about other people to you.
Gossiping is a kind of normal thing for teenage girls. But if they’re always talking about your mutual friends or their own friends, then odds are they’re doing the same thing to all of your other friends about you.
3. They let you pay for everything.
Friendships should be half and half. That means you should not be paying for your friend every time. If they always conveniently forget their money or never have it and let you pay for everything, then they’re probably using you.
4. They constantly act like they’re better than you.
Something good happens for you, and they throw snide remarks in about your life and make you feel inferior to them.
5. They’re never happy about good things that happen to you.
They’re always quick to tell you everything good that happened to them, but the moment you tell them good news about yourself, they change the subject or act like they don’t care. If that’s the case, then they probably shouldn’t really be considered “friends.”
And my own advice:
If they are never there for you, then they probably don’t care. It’s as simple as that.
So learn to distinguish the difference between the real friends and the fake ones, because friends can be the cause of most of your stress. The simple fact to they’re the ones giving you the problems, or that you don’t have anyone to vent to when you’re upset.
Learning these things can make all of the difference in determining your future.
If you missed Chapter 1 and 2 of Kaitlyn’s Freshman High School Survival Guide, use this link:
High School Survival Guide Chapter 1-2
Kaitlyn B
ooker is a senior at Foley High School who has hopes of going to college for criminal justice to be a detective or private investigator. In her free time she enjoys writing, listening to music, and hanging out with her friends. She loves writing opinion articles and hopes that she can make a difference.
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