Brain dump: first month of high school

I started building this website recently, roughly when high school began. It's been about a month since school started, and I figured I'd put something up here. So I decided to start by talking about how the first month went.

Of course, I'm not an expert, but I suppose I've survived long enough to have opinions. Anyway, here's my report.

What we're working with#

The school itself is... fine. The high school campus is significantly larger, and it took me a while to learn where every room is. I don't really know what the best thing here is, but I do enjoy the tea bar because you can buy snacks and drinks there.

Then there are the clubs. I went in thinking I'd pick one or two, but ended up looking at way more, including photography, programming, and drones. Although I don't have time for all of them, I joined anyway, since I suppose some of them don't have a set period.

Then there are the clubs. I went in thinking I'd pick one or two, but ended up looking at way more, including photography, programming, and drones. I don't have time for all of them, but I joined anyway since some don't meet on a set schedule, so I figured I could instead show up when I actually had a free block.

We're allowed laptops and iPads on campus, but rarely phones. We are a boarding school, so there's a rule that we must keep all phones inside our boarding houses, even though many people secretly bring them out to buy snacks at the tea bar.

We're allowed laptops and iPads on campus, but rarely phones. We are a boarding school, so phones are supposed to stay inside the boarding houses all the time. Nevertheless, plenty of people still sneak them out to buy snacks at the tea bar.

For 9th and 10th graders, we have to hand in all our technology at 9:30 p.m. and be asleep by 10, which is a bit disgusting since we usually sleep from 11:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. On the first day, we also had to register the serial number of every device, supposedly so nobody could turn in a decoy. It's not too bad if you finish anything that needs a screen before then.

By the way, I'm not a seven-day boarding student, so I arrive on Monday and go home on Friday.

The classes#

This year, our schedule changed, according to the seniors. We used to have six periods a day, an hour each, with breaks ranging from ten minutes to an hour, depending on which break you were talking about. Now we have seven periods, fifty minutes each, and the shortest breaks are merely five minutes.

As usual, my favorite subject is math, mostly because it's the easiest class for me, and also because it doesn't pile on as much homework as the others. I would say it's the only class where I don't check the clock, which is the highest compliment I can give.

I don't have a specific least favorite, and, frankly, if you don't have a subject you wholeheartedly hate, it's quite difficult to decide your least favorite subject, even more difficult than deciding your favorite. Some classes are just less attractive than others, and to be fair, that's not really the class's fault. Sometimes I'm simply not as interested.

The daily grind#

First period starts at 8:00 a.m. For boarding students, which is most of us, that means getting up around 6:20 (some get up as early as six to shower). The tech locker opens around 6:30 to 6:45, so that's the perfect window to wake up, wash up, get dressed, and grab our phones and laptops (technically, we're not supposed to take our phones out of that locker in the morning, but apparently nobody cares).

To get to know the campus, we arrived the afternoon before the first day (you can call it Day 0). Our parents also arrived, helped us settle into our dorms, and left campus (around 6 p.m.) after attending a session. Around 8 o'clock, after we all finished eating dinner, the seniors walked us around the campus so we'd know where each room was.

And yes, despite that, I still walked into the wrong room. Not because I got lost, though, but because I lost my schedule and walked into math class (it was actually English, in another building).

Lunch is much better than middle school, but it still behaves unreliably. Sometimes the food is fine, and I'll ask for extras, but other times it isn't as attractive as I'd expected (straightforwardly: it tastes like shit). We also eat dinner in the cafeteria, and dinner is usually better than lunch. If I'm not hungry, I stay in the dorm and skip it.

Homework is a different story. In 8th grade, we had loads of assignments, and I thought it would all be over in 9th grade. It started fine, but then the load crept up, especially when there were quizzes to review for.

People#

The biggest change, though, is the people. A lot of old friends left after 8th grade. Fortunately enough, a good number of them stayed, especially the ones I was actually close with, and as far as I can tell, making friends here isn't that difficult. Besides regular classes, there are also clubs, co-curricular activities (CCAs), and events run by the school or by student leadership, and a lot of us actually go. During those events, you usually end up next to people you didn't know, and that's usually enough for you to start talking.

Things that went wrong#

In the interest of honesty, there are, of course, some lowlights. Not just my embarrassing moment, but also some things happening to us lately that we do not appreciate.

In the interest of honesty, there were, of course, some lowlights. Not just my own embarrassing moment. By that, I mean a few things have been happening lately that we didn't appreciate.

My own embarrassing one, as I said, is losing my schedule and walking into math class when it's actually English. The other one is the school Wi-Fi. As expected, the student network actively blocks social media and popular VPN clients that help circumvent it, and eventually even Tor. As a result, some people wanted access to the staff network instead. A handful of staff logins were going around at the time, some from teachers, others left over from middle school. It didn't last, though, as IT eventually noticed, and they either rotated those passwords or shut those accounts off (for example, summer camp was already over, so staff accounts related to the summer camp were permanently deleted).

This incident sparked widespread discussion among students, since many were using the staff network. Since I know a little about network security, I tried to investigate. First, based on what I gathered, the IT department routinely checks the staff network's data usage by account, usually every three to four weeks. Since many students use the same accounts, usage will spike, and IT can determine whether it's being leaked to students.

A friend of mine suggested using the staff logins that were already going around as a foothold (the technical term for this is “pivoting”, by the way). Using this leaked account, I could then use its staff-level access to move laterally through the internal network until I found the account database and dumped every credential in it, while spoofing my device's MAC address first so that if IT ever traced the traffic, it wouldn’t lead back to my machine. But since this method would take way too much effort and is genuinely illegal, I turned it down. Instead, I ditched the well-known clients the school already blocks (like Clash Verge), switched to a more niche one whose protocol the filter doesn't recognize, tweaked the VPN’s rules and config, and set up a LaunchAgent that keeps a small script I wrote running in the background. This script watches for real-time traffic from social media apps and forces it into the tunnel. It worked pretty well, so I consider the problem solved.

What I figured out#

Okay, now for the slightly serious part.

High school isn't the movie version. So far, it's working out fine, and it's also a bit boring sometimes.

If I could tell myself one thing from a month ago, it would be to manage my time carefully. The work doesn't look bad on any given day, but you only have two hours of study hall per day, so it genuinely gets bad when you let it slide, and then you're finishing assignments late while reviewing for a quiz. You'll end up in really bad shape if you don't finish things when they're assigned (the consequences are very severe once the numbers accumulate).

I'm also kind of proud it didn't take me that long to get used to high school. At first, I thought it would take a while, but then I had things on track by the end of the first week.

For the rest of the year, I'll try to finish what I'm learning now and get a glimpse of stuff like AI and machine learning.

Anyway, that's month one. I probably won't write another post like this at the end of month two. Future posts will likely focus on specific ideas I find interesting and worth discussing.

Goodbye, and have a happy day.