As the school year enters its final month and summer vacation draws ever closer, I’ve been left wondering what the true takeaway of high school is. 

Classes are the biggest takeaway from high school. You can take so many different classes either for fun or for academics. One class, for me, that was both for academics and for fun was Foundations of Journalism or FOJ. The class allows you to learn about journalism such as making a newspaper, writing an article, taking photos or designing pages.

After FOJ, I applied for a job on the online staff which is one of four classes that you can take after FOJ. The other three were print, broadcast, and yearbook. On the online staff, I originally wrote question and answer articles (Q and As) about teachers, then I progressed to write full profiles on teachers. In February of 2019, I wrote an opinion article on the new intro to agriculture class. This was my first opinion article. That is when I knew that journalism was a major takeaway from my high school experience, because it was enjoyable.

I think what truly added to my high school experience was trying out new classes. In my freshman year, I took Visual Basic which was a programming class. I am not a big fan of coding, but it was still fun to take the class and learn something I had no prior knowledge of.

Another class that I am currently trying out is Accounting. It was my first business class, so it was fun learning about the language of business and to learn something new.

I think that the biggest takeaway from high school is to try out new classes because you just might find a class that is enjoyable for you.