In my high school I was always told to take AP classes. One because it would boost my GPA - since the grading scale was five points instead of four, meaning a B was a weighted A. The second reason was because it would prepare me for college. I would take the exam in May and if I did well enough I would test out of some classes at college or I would have a baseline of knowledge which should make my college classes easier.

During high school I pounded in the AP classes. While I didn’t take seven senior year like a girl in my graduating class did, I took a fair share, enough for me to be up late into the night doing homework and be bored to tears in most of my classes after AP testing was over in early May.

I have known since I was eight years old that I want to study business in college. I only applied to universities with business schools and fortunately got into all of my top ones, including the university in which I attend now.

Knowing that as a business major you had to take economics as one of your fundamental classes, I wanted to take AP Economics in high school so I could get ahead for when I got to college. Long story short thanks to budget cuts, schedule conflicts, and my incredibly high academic achieving senior class, while I originally intended to take AP Economics my senior year, I didn’t.

So senior year I was placed into a semester long economics class. And what ended up being a random class I was placed into with a bunch of people I didn’t know, turned into a class where I learned the foundation of what I want to do with the rest of my life and made some of my dearest friends.

But this wasn’t any ordinary economics class. I had heard about this economics class. All my friends who had graduated said it was impossible. The tests were so hard, the teacher wasn’t nice, and all the class did was hurt their GPA.

So obviously I went into this class with very low expectations. I went into the class thinking I could just sit in the back, take my own notes, and hopefully scrape along with a low A.

That was not the case. We had assigned seating, and I was front and center. And if that wasn’t enough for the introvert that I am, there was graded participation. Meaning I had to talk, my worst nightmare. I came home from class after the first week and my dad asked me how my economics class was and I just gave him a scowl and said how I was wishing for the semester to go quickly.

A few weeks after classes started, there was back to school night, where the parents meet the teachers and learn what you will be doing for the next year. You would never guess who my dad befriended, my economics teacher. He came back from back to school night with this huge grin on his face and told me how much I was going to learn in this economics class. I thought he was crazy.

He was not. As I reflect back on my life in college and think of all the things I have learned in the past eighteen years and how they have prepared me for life now, on the top of my list is that economics class. Let me explain why.

The big assignment for the course was an activity referred to as “The Game.” It was a real life version of life. The game began by people getting jobs, which were on a first come first serve basis. You then had the option to rent a desk or buy a desk or stand in the front of the classroom.

You then started off the game with 12,000 “megabucks” and had nine weeks to triple it.Ways to earn megabucks included doing your job, investing your money in the stock market, investing your money in real estate, and even creating additional services that other students in the class wanted to buy like baking cookies and selling them to students in the class for 10 megabucks a piece.

Some people did better in this game than others. Despite the economy not being super hot last winter, the majority of the people who got A’s in the game invested in real estate. And while this game seemed so trivial at the moment, looking back, the lessons I learned in that game helped prepare me for life now.

I learned how to manage my money, how to invest in the stock market, so many things that a traditional economics class based off a textbook would never teach me.

Thank you Mr.Nagore, I am passing Econ and still have money despite being a broke college kid. Life couldn’t be much better.