Jasmine Montich (12) is wrapping up her final year at West. She has been in band all four years, was an active member of Mindful, and a participant in two foreign languages. She has also been accepted into El Camino College. I interviewed her on her experiences in high school.

Q: Did your experience in band influence you in any way?

A: Yeah. A lot of people I met here shaped me into the person I am today. A majority of my friends are in band. I’m basically super chill because I met all these kids that showed me that you know it’s okay to be weird and enjoy what I have”

Q: What plans do you have after college?

A: My end goal is to become a pediatrician so I have to do a lot more work. And I have to do 12 years more school and going to community colleges and transferring and it’s going to be a lot of work

Q: Are you happy with the college you’re going to?

A: Yeah definitely because El Camino is one of the cheapest schools out there and they have a lot of really good programs for first-year students. I’m actually in a program call First Year Experience where they basically help you get into your classes. You get first priority and you get put into cohorts where you get to meet people and you like always work with them while you’re there. Which is pretty cool and there are also a lot of good transfer programs like the honors transfer program. And it’s just really helpful going there and also not worrying about rent or getting lost is also a huge plus.

Q: What motivated you to join extracurricular activities?

A: I like to try a little bit of everything so actually for my first two years I did Japanese and then my junior year I did French just because I like to try new things. I wasn’t really good at either but it was really fun to try and meet all these new people and yeah I like sinkingmy toes into everything. With band it’s fun doing things meeting people playing. And then with Mindful it’s nice educating people and learning more about mental health and then with language is where I get to learn about different parts of the world and kind of where some English words come from so it’s all pretty cool.

Q: Do you have any advice for somebody who would want to pursue some of the stuff you’ve done, like clubs and extracurricular activities?

A: Just a quick thing is make sure that you’re always taking care of yourself like because your world revolves around you so you want to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself. Make sure to space yourself out and if that’s not your thing or if you don’t work like that that’s fine just try to figure out how you work and what you do best so that when you go to the real world you’ll have yourself in a better place and you can apply those things to different things.