When I was in high school, I was a student in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. Now if you know anything about this program, you probably know that it is essentially like taking the hardest college courses while still being in high school. In short, the IB program is a program for highly intelligent high school students across the nation and the globe that provides them with a world-class, well-rounded education while also preparing them to become the best versions of themselves through writing an extended essay and earning CAS or creativity, action, and service hours.

And while I'm pretty certain that 99% of students who were in IB in high school will say that IB was too much work or that it didn't allow them to enjoy their high school years as much as they would've liked to, I know for me personally, looking back I couldn't imagine my high school years without it. Sure, much like the rest of my peers, I complained way too much about the workload and sacrificed an unbelievably large amount of hours of precious sleep, but in the end, I gained invaluable skills and experiences that, little did I know, would lead me to be incredibly successful in college, both with my academics as well as in many other areas of college life.

In terms of how prepared I was for college in an academic sense, I was more than prepared, so much so that I have consistently gotten great grades throughout my time in college. In fact, I wholeheartedly believe that the coursework in IB was significantly harder than the coursework that I am currently doing in college, thus proving that the program does an exceptional job at preparing their graduates for the academic rigor in college.

Beyond the academics though, the IB program taught so much more than how to analyze a Shakespearean play or how to calculate the exchange rate of currency by hand, it truly taught me some invaluable life skills, such as how to manage my time effectively, how to prioritize, how to develop and most importantly maintain an extremely strong work ethic, and how to balance work and play, among many other things, of course. For these skills and many others, I am beyond grateful to the program, its curriculum, our IB coordinator, our IB guidance counselors, and of course, our teachers who worked tirelessly every single day to make sure that their students were truly learning, not only about the subject matter at hand, but also how that information that they were learning in class could transform from words on the page of a textbook, to actual useful information that could be applied to society and to the "real world."

Overall, my experience as a student in the IB program is one that will never take for granted. Not only did I bond with some of the greatest people I have ever met over the immense lack of sleep, the almost unbearable amount of homework each night, and the sheer difficulty of the curriculum at large. In essence, without IB I don't think I would be the student or even the person that I am today.