Tina Tran, 17, is a senior at Silver Creek High School. Her only objective in school is to do the minimum to pass and move on with life. 

People may or may not agree with that, but that’s how life is to Tina. She has to balance school and work on a daily basis, and YouTube occasionally, and her approach is to prioritize her tasks in order of importance to her. In order, it goes work, YouTube, and school. Clearly, school isn’t as important to her as most people want it to be. But there’s a really good reason why. She works at Happy Lemon, where all her years of drinking boba pays off, because now she gets to work with boba and make boba all the time. On YouTube, she gets the chance to sing, which is her dream ever since she was little and it’s the only time when she gets to really express herself and be the person she wants to be, even if it’s only for a few minutes.

To Tina, the only thing that really matters out of the school system and career is the basics. Once you know the basics, you’re done. And especially to her, whose career path doesn’t require much general education, she doesn’t need to pay as much attention to it, and that in itself is quite reasonable. Especially in this day and age where students are so pressured to work hard and go to a good college, her views aren’t well appreciated, but that’s okay to her. “As long as I’m happy, I don’t really care,” she says.  

It’s not easy to deal with so many things at once, though. She’s cried several times doing math, gotten tired at work, and almost fell asleep recording a song. It’s a struggle to balance the three events and she even joked about dropping out to work full time, saying, “What’s stopping me from dropping out [right now]?” It’s not a challenge to figure out why she would feel that way. Can you blame her? 

She would rather die than take computer science, math, or stay in school for even another year. Now, the person reading this could completely disagree, but that’s not how it should be for her. According to Tina, the point of life is to be happy. She voluntarily chooses to do things that aren’t conventional or “acceptable” simply because they make her happy, and that’s really what life is.