“A year ago, I was very step-wise. I planned everything,” Sun said. “But I just ended up stressing myself out too much. I’ve made enough mistakes to realize I should just live for each day.”

Sun remembers the moment he decided to embrace his philosophy of keeping balance in his life and being efficient with his time. It was during his sophomore year when he was in the midst of creating a ‘choose your own adventure’ book application that used an interface based off of popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

“There was a moment at two in the morning when I realized the last month of coding has been useless,” Sun said. “Finding a balance between school and what you do. That was a struggle.”

He has slowly realized that the competition for high grades and standardized testing scores at MVHS is both artificial and inefficient. Instead of focusing on a grade, Sun believes that people should focus on learning and practicing what they are passionate about since the time one gets to focus on work is so short.

In the end, Sun said the best thing one can do to avoid breakdowns is by learning to manage your own stress. Sun takes his philosophy on focusing more on learning than the grade directly from his coding experience, which threw him into a lost state before allowing him to regain focus and learn to improve instead of dwelling on his failure.

“As a coder, you spent most of your time learning on your own. It’s an asset for all programmers to be very independent on learning and to know what you want to learn,” Sun said. “Having that skill allowed me to realize what learning really is. It’s not a perimeter in school. It’s a perimeter in life.”