Before I got accepted into Mass Academy, I took part in many extra-curricular activities. Many of them were in conjunction with my sending school, Oakmont Regional High School, but there were a couple that had no relation. While I will likely be able to continue to participate in some of these activities during my time at the academy, there will be ones that won't work out because of time and/or location.
When I first moved up to high school, I decided that I wanted to be more involved with school activities, since I had only participated in soccer and math club in middle school. One of the groups that I attempted to run for was Student Council, and I soon discovered that was the best decision I could’ve made. I was lucky that my class voted for me, since there were only 4 freshman positions with 6 people running. StuCo is full of some of the greatest people I'll ever meet, and our advisor/my uncle Dufour does a great job at making the experience as fun as possible.
There are so many things about StuCo that made my experience at my sending school, Oakmont, so much better. We ran pep rallies, Homecoming, Spirit Weeks, and numerous other specific events. Some of these events included Haunted High,Turkey Bingo and Faculty Appreciation Day.
We also went to a few conferences for all the Student Councils that are a part of the Central District of the Massachusetts Association of Student Councils (CDMASC), and even one for every council in the Massachusetts Association of Student Councils (MASC), which is a 3 day event held in Hyannis. StuCo provided me with the greatest experiences from Oakmont, and if my school work for Mass Academy allows it, I can go back to participate in even more events as an honorary member.
To see more about the events that Oakmont's Student Council runs, click here.
For most of my life, the only sport that I had participated in was soccer. That changed in my freshman year of high school when the winter season started and I decided to join the Indoor Track Team, and that was a decision that I will never regret. Track is so much fun, and it has the best sense of community and even family among it’s players and coaches. There’s really only 1 running event going on at a time, and everyone not in a field event is in the stands cheering on the runners in that race. It’s very community driven and everyone is supportive of one another. I took part in sprinting events, specifically hurdles as soon as I finished training (which took the entirety of my first Indoor season because of how difficult the technique is), and for field events I first took on discus and javelin in the spring (indoor doesn’t have many options), and I was going to switch javelin out with pole vault this season, but unfortunately the pandemic shut that down. Despite that, track has been a lot of fun, and I even decided to switch out soccer for Cross Country in my sophomore year. While it is very different from track, it’s still a similar group of people, and there’s still a lot of encouragement from the teammates who finish before most of the others. It was hard for me, a sprinter, to start running 5-7 straight miles everyday for practice, but it was definitely worth it.
Even though I replaced soccer as my school sport in the fall season with Cross Country, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t find a way to still play soccer. Without the option to play school soccer, I decided to join AWRSD’s recreational soccer league, with a much more laid back group of people and atmosphere. I started playing soccer when I was 3, and so far this might be the only year where I will have to skip a season. I played the town’s recreational soccer league until 5th grade, when I signed up for Outlaws, which I did for 2 years before joining the school team. While I did love the sport, the group of people I had to hang out with were most of the reason that I joined Cross Country in my sophomore year. To put it simple, most of them were very obnoxious. This actually wasn’t true when I switched back to Rec Soccer. Most of the people there were friends from school, and the ones I didn’t know weren’t really all that annoying. And since practice is only 1 day a week at 6 and all games are on Sundays, I look forward to continuing in this activity if I get a chance.
When I was 5, my parents signed me up for karate classes. 5 years later, I got my black belt, and 5 years after that, I finished my training for all of the base motions in the system, earning myself a 3rd degree black belt. The 10 years it took me to accomplish this crazy feat were arduous, informative, and very fun. I’m not going to go into the specifics of what actually goes on, since the whole idea of karate is supposed to be kind of a secret. However, there were some things that were taught that aren’t specifically about karate. For example, we were taught very early in our training about very important terms that are applicable to a lot of scenarios. These include attributes to follow: modesty, integrity, perseverance, self-control, and indomitable spirit, and things to avoid: rashness, apathy, covet, stress, fear, and spite. Most of these lessons were taught to us very early on, and I still find situations where they come to mind. Karate has been a huge part of my life, and even though I didn’t get the full experience of my 3rd degree graduation due to the quarantine, it was still a satisfying and gratifying conclusion to the 10 years of work it took to get there.
At the start of our freshman year, my girlfriend and I made a deal that if she joined Rec Soccer, I would join the Drama Club. We both followed through, and we both realized that we made the right choice. Drama Club was very fun to be a part of, and while the spring musical isn’t technically a part of their events, I still auditioned for that too. The main event of Drama Club is what’s called the Interclass Plays, where each grade has to find, direct, and perform a 1 act play in a competition for a trophy and a huge bag of jellybeans. This year, our grade chose “10 Ways to Survive the End of the World” by Don Zolidis, and I had 2 roles: Google Home and Giant Evil Bunny 2. Even though we lost to the seniors, making it that class’s 3rd win in a row, it was a very fun experience; although I almost killed my throat when I did a high-pitched bunny voice. After that whole thing, it was time to start working on the spring musical, and this year was gonna be Guys and Dolls. I was really looking forward to being able to be in a full-scale musical, in which I’d be playing Joey Biltmoore and a crapshooter, but of course the universe had other plans. We were getting really close to show night, but then everything changed when the coronavirus attacked.
In the tech ed department at Oakmont, some electives work in paths. For example, in order to take Materials and Construction, you must first take Wood Tech. One of these linear paths involved the VEX Robotics Competition. There was a class, Engineering Design, dedicated to building the robot, and the next class, Advanced Engineering and Robotics, had you programming a robot from the next group in the previous class. However, before you could take either of these classes, you had to take Design Tech. This meant that you had to be at least a sophomore to build a robot, and at least a junior to program it. That meant that I joined one of Oakmont’s VRC teams in my sophomore year. That year’s competition was called Tower Takeover, where the goal was to stack cubes inside a small goal that could fit 3 at the base, and onto towers for a score multiplier. We would spend a majority of class building our robot, and we even stayed after school fairly consistently. In order to test our robot before the competition in May, we had a scrimmage with our school’s robots against those from North Middlesex in December. Our robot came in 3rd overall, only coming behind an Oakmont group of seniors and another Oakmont group. That being said, we still had many issues to fix before the actual competition, such as our robot being very top-heavy when fully extended, as you can see in the video. However, it turns out that we didn’t have anything to fix, since the coronavirus cancelled the competition.