(MONEY Magazine) – At the age of 13, Latoya Hunter wrote a book! It is called The Diary of Latoya Hunter: My First Year in Junior High and was published last September by Crown Publishers in New York City. Latoya, who is now 14 years old, went to junior high in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, a section of New York City. Last year she moved to Mount Vernon, N.Y., a place with less crime and violence, where she is now in the 10th grade. We asked her to write down her thoughts on what it's like to be a teenager today. Here's what she had to say:

BECOMING A PERSON I remember the day I turned a teenager -- June 13, 1991. I wrote in my diary: ''I don't think I'm changed since yesterday, when I was 12, but it feels good to be a number that ends in 'teen.' '' When I wrote that, I had been a teen for only 24 hours. Now I've had almost two years' experience, and I know that a change in a number isn't the only change that comes with being a teenager. The big difference hit me when I started high school a few months after my 13th birthday. I had skipped eighth grade, so everyone was older than me. It was like stepping into a new world, where no one was looking after me. I had to look after myself. I had a choice of ruining myself or pushing ahead. It was all up to me. There were two groups of kids I could join. Group 1 was the group who went to all their classes, did their work and made school a place of learning. Group 2 was the group who skipped classes, didn't do their work, cared only about being popular and made school more like a playground. I went for Group 1. To be honest, sticking with that choice was not easy. Some of the students in Group 1 acted like they were better than everyone else. Some of the teachers didn't seem to care whether we learned or not. They were just out to get a paycheck. There were times when I even hesitated to step into a classroom. But the difference between just feeling that way and actually joining Group 2 is that I didn't hesitate for long. I share this experience with you because I want to show you that when you become a teenager, you become your own person with your own choices. You change from being a kid to a young adult. Think like a young adult -- not like a kid!

POPULARITY I was going to base this part on those statistics you always hear about problems in school. I killed that idea. The people who gather statistics don't go to school every day. They don't see things through our eyes. All the problems I see seem to come from one big problem: Everybody wants to be popular. And to be popular, you have to do two things: 1) Always be sure to dress in the latest styles; 2) Get the attention of the opposite sex. If you don't have rich parents, you probably won't be wearing the latest styles all the time. You'll look at the other kids with their nice clothes and shoes, and you'll do anything to have nice things too. That leads kids to selling drugs. The second part of being popular -- being attractive to the opposite sex -- leads to the problems of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. (Trying to be popular isn't the only reason for these problems, but I find it's often the main one.) When a girl thinks she is not pretty enough, she'll do anything to get and keep a boy's attention, even something as sacred as having sex. When are we going to wise up? It doesn't matter what people think of us as long as we think highly of ourselves.

WHY I WANT TO SUCCEED I'm not proud to say this, but no one in my family has gone to college. My mother's reason is that she got pregnant in high school and got married right after that. The example of my mother's life is one of my strongest motives for working hard and being focused on going to college. I say this with no disrespect. I'm using my experience as a child of parents who haven't gone to college to push me up and not to bring me down. My parents work hard, but they don't have college-graduate jobs. There have been things I've needed or wanted but couldn't get because there wasn't enough money. I don't want my kids to be deprived of things because of my mistakes. I choose my goals based on the kind of life I would have if I didn't reach them. I think everyone should do that.

OUR VIOLENT WORLD I'm no good when it comes to waiting. But the other day, while I was sitting in my dad's car waiting for him to come out of a store, an uncomfortable feeling came over me. It was fear. A vision kept running through my mind of someone breaking into the car and doing who knows what with me. It made me upset to realize that just sitting in a car could be dangerous. It hurts me to know this is the world I have to live in. I have a little nephew named Devoy. He's one year old. I picture him walking down the street a few years from now and having a stray bullet take his life. It's such a frightening idea that even thinking about it makes me cry. I'm glad I'm writing this article. It's a chance for me to tell you readers who are close to my age that eventually the world will be ours. We can't let things get any worse than they already are. We have to work to make the world a place we will love to live in.