Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself and what hobbies/sports you do.

A: “So I’m Gino Murdock, I am a senior now at Huron High School. I’m gonna be graduating soon, but I have played baseball ever since I was 10. I recently quit this year. I’ve been playing all throughout high school, but I decided not to play my varsity year. I really enjoy working on cars or pretty much anything engine based. I don’t really like working on electric cars, it’s kind of cringey. I really like figuring out how things work, not just cars, but mechanics or engineering, or just figuring out how things are put together. I think they’re really interesting.”

Q: What is one class/club you would recommend to underclassmen? Why?

A: “Auto, because I think Mr. Snyder is a really good teacher, he teaches a good course. I think it’s good for everyone to know, even for someone like me who just likes complicated stuff. But it’s really valuable for anyone to know because you should know how to change your tire or do an oil change because they’re really simple things that you could do in less than 30 minutes if you just spend the time in high school to learn these things.”

Q: How are you feeling about graduating this year?

A: “I think it’s something I’ve always been looking forward to. I remember when I first got my graduation year, which was in middle school, I got it in 2023. I remember I was like, “Oh that’s never gonna happen. That’s like decades.” Down the road, now it’s not even a month out. I’m ready for it. I feel like a lot of people have this attitude when they graduate high school. I’m so ready to just get out, I can’t wait to be an adult and finally be on my own. I think I’m gonna miss it a little bit because going to school is always kind of fun. I always saw it like I was climbing a mountain. Up until this point, I’ve always just been climbing this mountain and when you graduate, you’re at the top of the mountain. And you can view the whole world and you can go wherever you want. Now I’m about to see the whole world. I can go anywhere.”

Q: Ten years from now, what is one high school memory you will still remember?

A: “I feel like there is not one certain memory, I think all of auto is probably just going to merge into one big glob of memories. I won’t remember a lot of things. I’ll never forget Junior year, which was my first year in auto and I wasn’t really competent enough with cars or metalworking or any skills that are related to cars. Mr. Snyder told me that I should hop right into a truck bed rebuild, and I was like, I don’t know how to metal work or how to weld and how to grind or anything. I had to learn all those skills quickly so I could just keep the project moving. I think it was a really fun project because it showed me that even though I had none of the skills to do this project, I was able to just pick them up really quickly, and apply them and get good at them and just keep the project moving. But there are a bunch of other memories like pulling an engine out of a Jeep Cherokee or the TransAm build, which is what I’m doing right now.”

Q: What is one piece of advice you would give to your freshman self?

A: “I would tell them about COVID obviously, because that was a real fly ball right there, kind of came out of nowhere. I’d say don’t stress about school so much because that’s the attitude I had going into high school. Then I just realized that all the teachers don’t really care that much. You can just hand in late work and most of them won’t care. It’s easy to pass your classes, you don’t need to work really hard. Try to focus more on classes that you really enjoy like Auto and then just try to power through the classes you don’t really like, like math or science. Just take it for what it’s worth and look forward to the fun classes that you really like.”

Q: What will you miss most about high school?

A: “There’s this thing that happens in high school where you get put in a room and for an hour with people you don’t really know. You need to figure out who they are and it’s almost like the ease of meeting new people and meeting new friends that are interested in the things that you do. In adulthood, it’s gonna be a little bit harder to meet people that are going to be interested in the things that I am interested in outside of the internet. But I guess I’ll miss it mainly because it was just a really big part of my life, school in general. It’s been four years that I’ve spent in a building. So now you have to get out of the building and go somewhere else. I’ll miss seeing some of my friends that I might not see again, and it’s gonna suck but it’s part of life. It’s just how it is.”