Before he even started high school, recent La Jolla Country Day School graduate Jamie Onaitis had his sights on going to the “best college possible.” So from Day 1, he committed to pushing himself to the limit, taking as many GPA-boosting classes as possible and playing sports. With that work came the highest cumulative grade point average in Country Day’s class of 2026, earning Jamie the Trustees’ Award, which recognizes the student with the highest cumulative GPA over the past four years. “My parents [Mark Onaitis and Rebekah White, both surgeons] are high achievers and I knew going into high school that I wanted to match them,” Jamie said. “When I was a freshman, I thought just getting straight A’s and having extracurricular [activities] would be all that I needed to get into whatever college I wanted. But as I watched older students go through the process of applying for colleges, I realized I needed to do more. It’s so competitive.” So he began a four-year endeavor to take as many advanced classes as possible and play basketball, football and baseball. “That would have been my choice anyway, but I also understood that I needed to push myself to the limit,” he said. To help get there, Jamie focused on using memorization techniques to retain information. “Science came easier to me, so when I was studying the humanities, I had to motivate myself,” he said. “It is so easy to remember something when you are motivated. … It was just sitting down and repeating everything and writing it down. I feel like there has to be some correlation between putting pen to paper and … remembering it.” That said, Jamie acknowledged that “everyone learns differently” and suggested that other students find whatever method of studying works best for them. Jamie said he avoided getting burned out by participating in sports and spending time with friends. “I played basketball, football and baseball early in high school,” he said. “I dropped basketball and football, but I kept the friends. That helped a lot. I always had someone I could call to spend time with. Plus, a teacher of mine made a claim that athletes perform better in school because they sleep better. “Looking back, I feel like using those few hours to run around and make myself tired prompted me to sleep more, and I think sleeping is as important as studying. So I started to prioritize sleeping over cramming. But that meant focusing in class every minute. I had to pick up everything I could in class, since I wasn’t going to spend hours at night studying.” When his senior year came around, his peers started discussing their GPAs. “It’s a small [senior class] and everyone talks and I never heard anyone say they had a higher GPA than me,” Jamie said. “So senior year was when I thought [earning the Trustees’ Award] could be a possibility.” With a final GPA of 4.76 pushing him to the top of his class, Jamie now is bound for Stanford University to study pre-med after more than 20 college applications. He advises students who might be considering a similar path to “always push yourself. It is better to reach your limit and maybe fail than to succeed at the easy stuff.” “Even if you don’t know what your passion is, take an AP [Advanced Placement] class, because it teaches you a lot about yourself,” he said. “When you are fried or tired, those are the times you become the toughest. But I have found that there is no such thing as working too hard, doing too much or trying too many new things.”