This I Believe Rewrite

I came across a quote in a magazine I picked up at Target on an ordinary day in 2006, when I was in Rhode Island spending one year with my dad who was on a sabbatical leave at Brown University. The quote was said by the headmaster of Rhode Island School of Design. It made me think for a while, and somehow it lingered in my head. “Study hard, play harder”… Yes, indeed! You have to work hard to be successful, but it is more important to enjoy moments of your life while you may. Over the next few weeks, it slowly became clear to me that I should live my life based on the quote. I believe that I should study hard and play hard to aspire to a satisfying life.
The world today is very competitive; I mean super competitive just like a jungle where animals fight each other for survival. Have you seen Mean Girls? Yeah, I’m talking about the scene at a mall where Lindsay Lohan imagines people as mean and aggressive as animals: explosive, destructive, and savage-like. People these days do whatever it takes to become successful. I swear, if SIS students are given guns and weapons saying that they will be granted 4.0 GPA, they will start shooting each other. Well, they may not. But my point is that SIS students are that desperate to get good grades. In Korea, private institutions hagwons are flourishing throughout the nation. Parents literally make their kids live there whenever they get a bit of break from school. Even my parents signed me up for a full week program of hagwon during the Korean thanksgiving break from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. I am still a teenager whose brain is still fresh and malleable. I need a lot of experiences and fun for proper maturation of my brain. However, teenagers like me are under enormous pressure to study hard and get good grades. Of course, studying hard is a given to have a successful life in the future. Yet, experience also plays a huge role in making a life successful.
On that week of the Korean Thanksgiving break, regardless of the stressful schedule, I met up with my friends for dinner, shopping, and relaxation, managing the stress level. I would suffer through the first half of the day and run to Apgujung Rodeo to meet my friends, then complain and gossip away my stress. My point is, for motivation, it is important to relieve stress by having fun. Hence, while studying there must be a balance in enjoying life. However, enjoying too much will disrupt studying. The balance between studying and having fun, as I like to put it, should be aware of.
So, study HARD during the school days and release stress on Friday nights. That way, there will be no regrets when looking back to the past. If the balance does not maintain, there will be disappointments and discontents. I guess another way to state this quote is "live life to the fullest, without regrets." To me, two important things for high school students are “studying” and "enriching." In such a critical time period that will shape our future, grades and experience will pave the way of lives and determine personalities. I am going to study hard, in order to seek success and not to disappoint my parents, while seeking every excitement I can get from my life.