La Jolla Country Day School awards 108 diplomas at graduation<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cMy parents [Mark Onaitis and Rebekah White, both surgeons] are high achievers and I knew going into high school that I wanted to match them,\u201d Jamie said. \u201cWhen I was a freshman, I thought just getting straight A\u2019s and having extracurricular [activities] would be all that I needed to get into whatever college I wanted. But as I watched older students go through the process of applying for colleges, I realized I needed to do more. It\u2019s so competitive.\u201d<\/p>\n
So he began a four-year endeavor to take as many advanced classes as possible and play basketball, football and baseball.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat would have been my choice anyway, but I also understood that I needed to push myself to the limit,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
To help get there, Jamie focused on using memorization techniques to retain information.<\/p>\n
\u201cScience came easier to me, so when I was studying the humanities, I had to motivate myself,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is so easy to remember something when you are motivated. \u2026 It was just sitting down and repeating everything and writing it down. I feel like there has to be some correlation between putting pen to paper and \u2026 remembering it.\u201d<\/p>\n
That said, Jamie acknowledged that \u201ceveryone learns differently\u201d and suggested that other students find whatever method of studying works best for them.<\/p>\n
Jamie said he avoided getting burned out by participating in sports and spending time with friends.<\/p>\n
\u201cI played basketball, football and baseball early in high school,\u201d he said. \u201cI dropped basketball and football, but I kept the friends. That helped a lot. I always had someone I could call to spend time with. Plus, a teacher of mine made a claim that athletes perform better in school because they sleep better.<\/p>\n
\u201cLooking back, I feel like using those few hours to run around and make myself tired prompted me to sleep more, and I think sleeping is as important as studying. So I started to prioritize sleeping over cramming. But that meant focusing in class every minute. I had to pick up everything I could in class, since I wasn\u2019t going to spend hours at night studying.\u201d<\/p>\n
When his senior year came around, his peers started discussing their GPAs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a small [senior class] and everyone talks and I never heard anyone say they had a higher GPA than me,\u201d Jamie said. \u201cSo senior year was when I thought [earning the Trustees\u2019 Award] could be a possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
With a final GPA of 4.76 pushing him to the top of his class, Jamie now is bound for Stanford University to study pre-med after more than 20 college applications.<\/p>\n
He advises students who might be considering a similar path to \u201calways push yourself. It is better to reach your limit and maybe fail than to succeed at the easy stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if you don\u2019t know what your passion is, take an AP [Advanced Placement] class, because it teaches you a lot about yourself,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you are fried or tired, those are the times you become the toughest. But I have found that there is no such thing as working too hard, doing too much or trying too many new things.\u201d \u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before he even started high school, recent La Jolla Country Day School graduate Jamie Onaitis had his sights…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[7,930,5184,6804,74,84,76,75,24811],"class_list":["post-346837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-california","tag-la-jolla","tag-la-jolla-light","tag-la-jolla-light-news","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-county","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-university-city"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}