Have you tried looking up “high school Freshman tips” on Google because the thought of starting high school left you a trainwreck of both social and academic anxiety? If you searched that term up online, you’ll notice something: good grief, none of this nonsense actually helps at all!

There’s a good reason for this, though. It’s related to search engine mechanics, the consulting industry, and a whole lot of other nerdy stuff. That’s not the focus of this article (thank heavens)!

This is, however, a more informative version of those crappy listicles. We’re going to try to provide you with the best high school Freshman tips that will actually help you survive. Many of our clients tread through high school with a cacophony of social challenges and academic struggles, so these tips will help you tackle them.

We base these tips off of what we do with our clients. So, if you follow these tips well, you will certainly thrive in high school without a sweat.

1. Develop Your Own Straight-A Strategy

We could’ve told you that you need to get good grades, and you do –duh! However, telling yourself you need to “get better grades” is actually not that helpful. You need to start from the very basics. That means developing your own strategy that best suits your learning style, your personality type, and your environmental factors. We actually cover this a little more in our other article here.

We would recommend creating a good Straight-A strategy through understanding your past motivation and demotivation triggers, taking a personality test, and planning how you will work around complicated environmental factors.

To understand your motivation and demotivation triggers, simply look at your past few years of academic strength and struggle. When were you productive? When were you not? Many of our clients find that their productivity follows a Pareto Distribution. This means that only around 10% of their work time successfully completes a majority of their work. The rest of their 90% of work time is spent on nonsense like Youtube cat videos and Social Media.

Here’s a visualization of most of our clients and their motivation and demotivation triggers.

As you can see, they are demotivated in the first few weeks of school, but only days before their final are they truly motivated to work. A majority of the work is done in the end despite only making up less than 10% of the available time. You have to determine how you can redistribute your work and effort evenly across time to maximize your productivity. It also makes studying for tests and achieving higher grades much easier and pain-free!

You also want to understand your personality well. This will help you understand your strengths and weaknesses, and help you work around them to the best of your advantage. We recommend taking a specialized personality test to maximize accuracy. So, don’t take one of those Buzzfeed personality tests. Get a real one from a counselor.

You may realize your proclivity for orderliness and structure can work to your advantage in keeping track of your work; however, you may also realize you have high neuroticism which translates to possible test anxiety. Whatever your results, make sure they are accurate and you know how to work around it.

In terms of environmental factors, this may be one of the most difficult to fix. Be very honest about what you can and cannot control. We’ve had clients who had devouring parents. That means they had parents who harbored jealousy of their children’s success, and they secretly wanted to have their kids fail so they would have to rely on their parental authority. We’ve also worked with others who had siblings who bullied them relentlessly or were sexually closeted. Sometimes, these are a whole nest of snakes that require more than just basic advice. However, know that getting good grades is impossible if you have a giant elephant in the room getting in the way. Settling these issues is important if you want to have the mental space to focus on getting good grades.

This bit of advice –along with tip #2– is one of the most important high school freshman tips. You shouldn’t ignore this one. If you believe you are struggling to develop a straight-A strategy properly, please contact us for a free consultation. Our experts can provide you with free advising to help you get results faster.

2. Learn How to Set Goals the Right Way: Results-Oriented vs Input-Oriented

Most of what you hear about procrastination and productivity is, well, kind of nonsense. If you were looking for high school Freshman tips about productivity, we can provide you a technique that actually works and makes sense.

This is a method we give to our clients, and it works quite well. It’s sort of the bare bones, and we do cover much more when we work with our clients personally. However, you can still get by with just this. Here it is:

Do not do goals; rather, do action. Or, in a fancier way of saying it: be input-oriented, not results-oriented.

Okay, we know how this looks: not doing goals seems sort of dumb, right? We agree. It sounds dumb to us too. After all, you usually hear that if you want to be a successful person, you have to have an aim. Yes, this is true. You need to have goals and you need to aim. However, take some time to think about this.

How does someone actually do a goal?

You can do the following perfectly fine:

1. Wash the dishes
2. Finish your homework
3. Walk the dog
4. Get 3 hours of studying finished

Now, how does one actually do this?

1. Earn straight As
2. Get elected as Student Council President
3. Go to Harvard
4. Earn your Doctorates

Do you see the difference here? There is a difference between what you do and what you earned as a result. If you want to know how to set your goals properly as a Freshman in high school, you first have to understand that you can’t do goals. You can do actions, though.

What happens if you tell yourself you’ll earn straight As? Well, you give yourself an impossible task. The only thing you can do within your power is study and work hard enough that you can earn a grade of A. That’s it. If you don’t think in this mindset, you will doom yourself to a procrastination loop.

If you try to earn straight As you’ll feel that such a goal is too far from yourself and you can’t achieve it. You have to set realistic goals like working and studying for 1-2 hours a day. Then, and only then, can you expect yourself to earn the grades you want.

You must not be results-oriented, but input-oriented. Funnily enough, this is actually a principle used by a lot of entrepreneurs. So, for all our readers hoping to apply for Berkeley HAAS; if you’re looking to start your own company then you should keep this principle in mind!

Alright, let’s bring in an example.

1. Susan has a 3.5 GPA. She knows that she wants to earn a 4.0 GPA; however, that would require a lot of work and study. She decides not to keep the GPA in mind. She instead focuses on what she can control, such as the amount she works and studies. This helps her develop the skills and talents necessary for the 4.0 GPA to come to her. Susan is smart: she is input-oriented and not results-oriented.
2. Anthony has a 3.8 GPA. He is quite smart, but in order to get accepted into a prestigious university for Engineering, he will need to have a more competitive GPA. Anthony zeros in on the 4.0 GPA and torments himself thinking, “I need to earn this 4.0”. His mindset makes it difficult for him to work on what actually matters. He is results-oriented instead of input-oriented, and that makes him focus less on the quality of studying and work that he can control.

As we’ve said already, this is one of the more important high school freshman tips in our list. If you are results-oriented and not input-oriented, you need to change this immediately.

Makes sense? Good. Onto the next tip.

3. Join Clubs, and Do/Create Something Great There

One of the other commonly echoed high school Freshman tips is that you should join a billion clubs. You can actually join as many as you’d like (though, we highly recommend our clients limit it to 3).

What’s actually more important than your attendance in clubs is what you do there. If you’re not in a club, we would highly recommend you join one. If there are no good clubs available, make one. Then, most importantly, you must do something or create something in said club that demonstrates something strong about you.

We actually had a client who was a member of 6 different clubs, not including attending church and other non-academic extracurricular activities. She didn’t have a life –a walking corpse traversing this corporeal realm as a human high school student in disguise.

My team and I actually had to convince her family that she had to drop some of these clubs. We didn’t want her to drop everything, but some of them didn’t add to her application at all. They were useless, and she didn’t do anything productive in those clubs other than attend meetings.

We then told her to dedicate her time to at least a few of the clubs left, and do something productive in there. She chose to start an environmental project with her community service club in her high school; they repainted a church and replaced the shabby wooden doors there.

It showed that she was willing to break from her coddled Irvine Bubble background and get on her hands and knees to work the dirty work. This was something that shone in her application and demonstrated a personality that admissions officers would want.

Remember: just focus on a few clubs at a time and dedicate more time in what you do there.

4. Make Good Friends

“Well, I already know I need to make good friends. I don’t need to read this section.”

Nope! Most people will be surprised how many of their friends or cliques in high school were irremediably malevolent and toxic. This can affect you in catastrophic ways.

To bring in an experience, we were approached by a family and their daughter a few years ago. She was struggling to succeed in her AP Lit class and keep her grades up overall. We took the first few hours to first talk and understand her relationship with high school before getting into the nitty gritty parts of school. It only took a few hours to scratch beneath the surface.

“Cassie doesn’t want to be friends with me anymore because the boy she likes actually likes me, but I don’t like him back. Now that boy is spreading rumors about…”

Here’s the facts: Most people have a 0% chance of successfully articulating the archetypal symbologies of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness when their minds are occupied with toxic friends. No wonder she was struggling in AP Lit –and every other class for that matter!

So, maybe your friends aren’t as involved in that level of toxicity. Fine. Here’s a more relatable example.

Since we’re primarily located in the Southern California region, we often get Asian American men and women in our lists of clients. The men in particular believe they have healthy relationships with friends they play video games with. In fact, many of them follow this same pattern.

1. Asian American
2. Decently smart and competitive
3. Sometimes shy
4. Plays one of the following games or more: League of Legends, Valorant, Gacha games like Arknights or Girls Frontline
5. Friends are toxic only when playing games, but okay outside of it.

We often find that one of the most common barriers to a clear mind in academics is actually the groups of friends that our clients surround themselves with.

Look at your own group of friends. When you play video games with them, or when you hang out with them in general, do you find that you are more calm and at peace with your mind? Or, do you find that you are more irritated and angry than before. For those who play competitive games, we notice that they tend to be more angry.

Learn to establish healthy relationships with your friends, and escape the common toxicity traps (whether they come from games or normalized and excessive drama).

Speaking of drama, let’s cover a bit of that.

5. Handle Drama Using The 1 to 5 Ratio

Here’s a weird claim that might go against the grain of what you usually hear.

We don’t think you should avoid all drama in high school.

Yup, that’s quite a weird thing to say –especially with how many school counselors and online advice would say otherwise. However, we’re very particular with our words here. We don’t mean to say you should shower yourself in every bit of juicy gossip in your school. We mean that just having a little bit of drama peppered in here and there is normal and arguably even healthy in a teenage life.

Here’s an interesting article on positive and negative interactions.

Okay, so what can you make out of this?

What this means is that most people actually cannot sustain themselves without at least a little bit of conflict in their personal relationships. This applies also outside of marriages.

So, when you are with your friends, you probably don’t want to have a toxic positivity atmosphere enforced. You also don’t want everything to be too toxic. You need to allow for a little bit of conflict to exist. Drama is okay in high school, and a little bit may actually keep your mental state more balanced. You just want to have something like this: 20% minor drama and 80% positive interaction.

This keeps your high school experience whole, not perfect. You should strive to have a whole high school experience rather than a perfect one because not having a whole experience makes you incomplete.

6. Don’t Submit to Peer Pressure; Be Stoic

It’s a generic one, but we feel that this is one of the many important high school Freshman tips you should follow. You should know how to avoid peer pressure from your school.

There will come times, whether from your teachers or your friends, when you will be pressured to say things that you do not believe in or follow rules you do not align yourself with. This can be hard on your soul. We don’t want to tell you to rebel at every corner, but you should keep in mind that for every time you betray yourself by submitting to social pressure, you lose a little bit of yourself.

Here’s an example: your friend says a joke that was not exactly well-received, and your class ridicules them for it. You feel that you should speak up and defend your friend, but the entire class would be against you as a result, so you don’t speak up about it. Your friend understands, but you think to yourself in the shower all the possible things you could have said and should have said.

“I should’ve defended my friend.” “I should’ve called them all out.”

This is quite common with a lot of students, and we would recommend that staying stoic and unmoving in the face of peer pressure is a good way to stay mentally sound. It can be hard, and you may be the object of ridicule, but it is certainly better than allowing the weakness and oppression of submitting to peer pressure to eat you from the inside.

7. Sleep Properly

This is perhaps one of the most difficult of our high school Freshman tips. It is certainly worth pursuing, though. We can guarantee that if you can sleep properly, you will not wake up early in the morning feeling like crap. Instead, you’ll actually wake up energized and ready for school.

Okay, lets get right to it. You need to do 3 things:

1. Invest in a good bed
2. Get adequate natural sunlight
3. Force yourself to follow the “early to bed, early to rise” sleep pattern

Getting a good bed is vital. There’s no exceptions. Personally, we recommend slightly hard and firm beds that don’t heat up too much. However, everyone is different. See what works for you.

Getting natural sunlight is critical to waking up early and without feeling groggy. We actually found that many of our students managed to wake up with natural sunlight and even replace their alarms. They didn’t need to wake up with a loud ringing from their phones, and they would be gently woken up by the sun’s rays. You should do this by positioning your bed such that your head will be right next to the window. If your room doesn’t have enough room for sunlight to enter, sleep in the living room if you have to.

Funnily enough, if you manage to replace your alarm clock and only wake up with natural sunlight, you may even wake up at around 5:00 AM.

One last critical thing you need is to follow the “early to bed early to rise” sleep pattern. We don’t mean early like 9:00 PM, but just something before 11:30 PM. Students sleeping past midnight is far too common. Don’t follow the trend that everyone else is doing. It’s weird, but sleep before 11:30 PM. The amount of rest you get will eventually force you awake early in the morning, and you won’t feel groggy and tired. This is especially true for people who follow steps 1 and 2.

Were our high school Freshman tips helpful for you? If you or your child are looking for more comprehensive guidance on how to do well in high school, you may want to speak with our counselors! We provide our callers with free consultations to answer any of your questions. If you are interested in attending our summer boot camp program or are looking to enroll your child in one, you can contact us for a free consultation and for further details as well.