Despite being largely oriented around Pacific Time, OHS is home to students in time zone differences ranging from Central, Hawaii, Eastern, Korea, to Philippine Time. In a recent poll of seventeen students, 70.6% said they are affected by time zone differences. Of the five students that said no, four of them said they lived in Pacific Time. Only one out of the students not in Pacific Time said they weren’t affected.
Mona Obedoza, a ninth grader living in Philippine Time, explains how the time difference affects her education. She says that it makes it difficult to get help on assignments, which is “particularly inconvenient when the deadline is too close… to wait for other people to wake up.”
Other OHSers say that time difference has an effect on their assignment due dates. Leonid Vishnevskiy and Rex Dan both live in Eastern time. Vishnevskiy says, “Time conversions are always annoying to do when they appear so often, it makes it frustrating to write down different times, even though it is easy.” However, Dan points out a positive aspect: “Your assignments have different due dates which is like really nice because if you have an assignment at 5 but you have a class at that time, it’s okay because for me, it’ll be due at 8.”

The time zone difference also narrows the selection of clubs Obedoza can take. “A lot of the clubs that I’d really, really like to join meet at around 2 or 3 in the morning in my time zone – as it is, I have to wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning for the club that I’m currently in,” she says. The same goes for classes: “Some classes also have very limited time zone selections. In middle school especially, a few of the classes I wanted to take didn’t have periods that worked for me, and I barely got a slot in the others. And all of the homeroom topic groups have time periods that are too early in the morning for me to attend.”
The difference in time zones doesn’t only impact academic life. Dan says that because he has “classes later at 6:15 [pm],” he “can’t really hang out with [his] [in-person] friends.” As for his OHS friends, he says that time differences don’t really affect his interactions.
On the contrary, Eowyn Wossman, an eighth grade OHSer, feels that despite living in Pacific Time, time differences affect her through her interactions with other OHSers. “I have one friend who lives in Singapore, and a bunch of others throughout the US, and it is often hard to find a good time that works for everyone to meet,” Wossman writes.
Obedoza says that OHS is worth the inconveniences. “Despite these little difficulties, studying here has been an amazing, life-changing experience, for which reason I don’t mind accepting that I have to make some adjustments.”