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My high school day lasted from 8:30 am to 3:25 pm, but I would usually remain in school from around 7:30 am to 6:00 pm for extracurriculars. I enjoyed every moment, but I could have made much more efficient use of time.
Extracurricular activities are fundamental to the high school experience. Freshmen entering high school are told to try every club, explore their options, and find their passions. For me, freshman year was consumed partially by schoolwork and mostly by club meetings.
As upperclassmen, students take on leadership roles. Their lists of extracurriculars shorten, but they have greater responsibilities in clubs in which they continue. By junior year, students have rigorous course loads and significant extracurricular responsibilities, leaving them with even less time.
As a club leader, my main responsibilities usually included delivering announcements, keeping attendance, and taking meeting notes each week. Learning tools like Google Slides and Google Sheets has proven very useful, but my responsibilities felt more like administrative tasks than organizational leadership. When students do propose improvements to clubs, they are not always welcomed.
High school students are capable of more creativity, innovation, and decision-making. Leadership positions may reward hard work and dedication, but they fill up students’ time with similar tasks each week. Students contribute to perpetuating a system, and their potential for personal growth and accomplishments is limited.
Students should instead choose activities that allow for independent decision-making, creativity, personal growth, and progress. Passion projects are the best way to maintain this degree of control, and they allow students to create real change and have major accomplishments.
Students should balance club leadership positions with unstructured time to fill with personal passions. This time could be spent, for example, independently learning to code and developing a useful web application for fellow students. When high schoolers maintain freedom over their time, they do things that make them stand out and have a real impact.
Joining a high school club is great for socializing, and everyone should do some activities. Being a member of competitive, academic, and artistic clubs can lead students to enhance skills and discover passions.
However, students who want to develop as scholars and change-makers need to primarily turn to personal projects. There are many personal projects students can pursue. Computer science projects teach widely applicable skills and yield beneficial creations for oneself and society, but only a small subset of high school students are interested in coding. Students can start businesses or nonprofits, but running a truly impactful organization requires resources that take years to obtain and consistent full days of work.
The most widely applicable personal project is academic research, but the necessary resources to conduct high-quality research have historically been difficult to access. Mentorship and community are essential: university students conducting research almost always have an advisor, and professors almost always have collaborators.
Jinso is making independent research more accessible for high schoolers by connecting researchers to mentors. High school students can find a researcher sharing their academic interests, who will serve as an advisor throughout the research process. Research mentors give students the capacity they need to write and publish a research project while leaving the student with complete ownership over their work.
When I wrote a research paper my senior year, I felt ownership and motivation in my work that I never felt within a club. I gained knowledge that was relevant to my interests, and I learned how to contribute to the academic community. For students who want to grow as scholars and achievers, conducting a research project is the best thing you can do.
GitHub is a popular platform used by computer scientists to manage their collaborative projects, but a similar program does not exist for academic work. There is no standard platform to create work, connect with others, and share work in one place. Most platforms only fall into one or two of these categories.The Jinso collaboration tool is a better way for groups to work on projects. By bringing the entire academic collaboration process onto one tool, it simplifies workflows and communication.The first steps for using the Jinso platform are:
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects. Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time.
Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects.
Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time. Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
When a new Project is created, an initial revision must be shared. This can either be plain text or a PDF.
The Project will be immediately visible to all Group members with the first revision shown. Group members can comment on the revision with questions or feedback, and others can reply to comments.When another revision of the paper has been completed, the Group admin can add a new revision to the same Project.
The revision will become visible above the prior revision, and it will have a new comment box associated with it. Projects make it simple to keep track of a paper’s entire revision history and discussions at each stage.
For each revision, Group admins can also create subtasks. Arrows allow Group members to view all of the different subtasks and comment on them individually. Subtasks allow a paper to be analyzed in unique components. For example, a research paper can have a unique subtask for each of its sections, and collaborators can discuss them all separately in the comment boxes. Jinso is a quicker way to collaborate on long-term projects. It makes it easier to connect, share, and manage the development of ideas and papers. You can create a Jinso account and start using the platform today for your research and academic needs at jinso.io.
My high school day lasted from 8:30 am to 3:25 pm, but I would usually remain in school from around 7:30 am to 6:00 pm for extracurriculars. I enjoyed every moment, but I could have made much more efficient use of time.
Extracurricular activities are fundamental to the high school experience. Freshmen entering high school are told to try every club, explore their options, and find their passions. For me, freshman year was consumed partially by schoolwork and mostly by club meetings.
As upperclassmen, students take on leadership roles. Their lists of extracurriculars shorten, but they have greater responsibilities in clubs in which they continue. By junior year, students have rigorous course loads and significant extracurricular responsibilities, leaving them with even less time.
As a club leader, my main responsibilities usually included delivering announcements, keeping attendance, and taking meeting notes each week. Learning tools like Google Slides and Google Sheets has proven very useful, but my responsibilities felt more like administrative tasks than organizational leadership. When students do propose improvements to clubs, they are not always welcomed.
High school students are capable of more creativity, innovation, and decision-making. Leadership positions may reward hard work and dedication, but they fill up students’ time with similar tasks each week. Students contribute to perpetuating a system, and their potential for personal growth and accomplishments is limited.
Students should instead choose activities that allow for independent decision-making, creativity, personal growth, and progress. Passion projects are the best way to maintain this degree of control, and they allow students to create real change and have major accomplishments.
Students should balance club leadership positions with unstructured time to fill with personal passions. This time could be spent, for example, independently learning to code and developing a useful web application for fellow students. When high schoolers maintain freedom over their time, they do things that make them stand out and have a real impact.
Joining a high school club is great for socializing, and everyone should do some activities. Being a member of competitive, academic, and artistic clubs can lead students to enhance skills and discover passions.
However, students who want to develop as scholars and change-makers need to primarily turn to personal projects. There are many personal projects students can pursue. Computer science projects teach widely applicable skills and yield beneficial creations for oneself and society, but only a small subset of high school students are interested in coding. Students can start businesses or nonprofits, but running a truly impactful organization requires resources that take years to obtain and consistent full days of work.
The most widely applicable personal project is academic research, but the necessary resources to conduct high-quality research have historically been difficult to access. Mentorship and community are essential: university students conducting research almost always have an advisor, and professors almost always have collaborators.
Jinso is making independent research more accessible for high schoolers by connecting researchers to mentors. High school students can find a researcher sharing their academic interests, who will serve as an advisor throughout the research process. Research mentors give students the capacity they need to write and publish a research project while leaving the student with complete ownership over their work.
When I wrote a research paper my senior year, I felt ownership and motivation in my work that I never felt within a club. I gained knowledge that was relevant to my interests, and I learned how to contribute to the academic community. For students who want to grow as scholars and achievers, conducting a research project is the best thing you can do.
