Anshuman Das

What does it mean to you to be in the top 10?

It’s a reward for the last four years because when you’re starting out with high school, it seems like a long journey and there might not always be an incentive to work hard. But you’re with your friends and you work hard together, you study together. It’s rewarding to finally be part of the five percent banquet and graduate.

Was it your goal to be in the top 10?

Not really. I wanted to perform highly and be somewhere near the top, but I didn’t have a set goal to be in the top 10 or top five. I think a large part of it was just doing well with my friends; my social circle that I was in, we all studied hard.

What advice do you have for younger students?

It’s best to not have a set goal: I think I did the right thing where I didn’t have a set goal. Just do the best that you can. Study hard, because academics prepares you well for college. Study hard to take hard classes if you have an interest in them. Also, have good friends that can help you with subjects if you need it, because some people are better at different subjects. Seek help when you need it.

What would you go back and tell your ninth-grade self?

One issue that I’ve always had, and I still have now is time management skills. I think that even though I performed well, I didn’t go about it the right way, because I was really bad at time management. I ended up doing everything at the last minute. It was really nerve wracking and stressful. I would tell myself to have better time management skills, and do things ahead of time so that I don’t have those stressful situations.

What’s your most memorable part of high school?

My most memorable part of high school is probably being with friends. There have been occasions like in ninth and 10th grade I had a group of friends where some of them went to [Texas Academy of Mathematics & Science]. I cherish those moments, and I still hang out with them sometimes, but it’s not the same. It’s interesting how time goes on and things change and then when something is gone, you look back on it more.

What are your thoughts on the current education system and college admissions?

Right now everything is based on grades and such and that’s stressful. It makes you stick to a system. It’s not always the most conducive to someone’s learning. Different people have different styles of learning, they have different systems that they could work out. The best thing you could do is maybe make education more individualized. But I realized that with the many students as we have, that’s not always possible. 

How do you stay motivated? 

I definitely suffered from senioritis. It’s because once ranks froze my grades dropped. One of my motivations is the standard I already had. I came into high school already being used to high grades. It’s like you don’t want it to drop; you’re just motivated to maintain a standard because you’re used to it, and you’ve been doing it. 

What are your goals? What’s your major? And how do you think your hard work so far will contribute to that?

My major is electrical and computer engineering, and those are tough. Even within engineering, electrical engineering is hard, because it requires a lot of physics. It’s also abstract physics, because electricity, it’s not like mechanics, where you have forces and things. It’s the movement of electrons and such, and it’s magnetic fields and stuff and it’s not something you can actually see in the real world. Because of that, it’s really abstract. My hard work and the way of thinking that I gained by going to the hard classes and taking IB will probably help me understand concepts as well. 

What’s your secret to success? 

Working hard, but also just being kind of free and letting your curiosity take you places. What I mean by that is that a lot of times when people sit down to learn or write a subject, they’re just doing it because they have to do it. It’s very rigid. You can force yourself to memorize things, but you aren’t going to understand the concepts intuitively, because you have no interest in it. If you want to learn something, you have to force yourself to become interested. Once you become interested, you ask yourself questions, you have to ask yourself, “why does this happen? How does it happen?” and you’ll learn the subject on your own. That way, you’ll have a better understanding of things.

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