Who Are You? | Nitya Mani

What defines us, nowadays, is unfortunately becoming our grades, successes, failures, and the exterior perceptions we project onto society, and seems to becoming less about who we are. Countless people at Harker are often described as “the one with all A+’s” or “the person who won XYZ contest”. Even when we mean to be complimentary, we are unknowingly reducing people’s value to that of their accomplishments, but there are a plethora of other qualities that make people special, unique, and worthy of remembering. Furthermore, when we judge people by their grades or the amount of social media they use, we often distance ourselves from them as people and lose out on friendships and camaraderie that can last a lot longer than the memory of their outstanding grade on that one biology test.

Harker is a very competitive environment and so is the world out there, but that doesn’t mean that we should lose sight of what is truly important in life, not numbers on a page, but the people who will potentially be with us for our lives if we take advantage of the friendships we can form in high school and instead of judging people by an arbitrary quality, befriending them for who they are inside.