I feared I wouldn’t be able to uphold my family’s standards. All the work given to me from my five core gifted classes and the stress started accumulating. My life was spiraling right before my eyes. I lost control of the steering wheel and ran myself right into a ditch; a ditch, more like a bottomless pit of scum. I thought I was strong enough to hold on for the ride but apparently I wasn’t. I reluctantly handed over the wheel to my parents and let them guide me to where I needed to be. Eventually, tenth grade rolled around and I put myself back together. I was broken glass taped together trying to refurbish myself. At this point I just had to make it through high school. At the end of tenth grade, I aced every class I had taken from band to chemistry. Eleventh grade creeped around the corner and the anxiety started to build up again. I wanted more for myself. I was no longer satisfied with being every other person in Hialeah Gardens High School. My options were to either get into dual enrollment or finish high school all together. Dual enrollment was ruled out when my test scores were not at the new passing score they had recently made. There were two months left of school and it was until then that I decided
All of my classes in high school I passed with no struggle. I would cram all the knowledge that I needed for a test the night before, so I thought college would not be any different. A week or two before my first ever college exam the professor announced that if we had not already been study, then we should start to right away. Being a young naive freshmen, I kind of blew the teacher off. Telling myself that I did not need to waste the next few weeks studying for one exam. So I waited until the last day to study. You might have an idea of what happened next. I failed the exam. Failing so bad that it would be nearly impossible for me to still get a C in the course. I could not even look at myself. The thought of disappointing my parents was making my stomach turn. This fear of failing the class was tearing me apart. The only chance at passing this class was if I turned myself into the perfect student. This meant turning things in on time, studying days in advance for exams, and going to my professor’s office hours. And that is exactly what I did. By some seriously hard work, long nights, and over a hundred red bulls, I was able to achieve a passing grade with a
The biggest piece of advice I would give to an incoming student is “You get what you put in”. Now I say this because my first semester of college was an experience that I disliked. Something that I did wrong was, I only went to class then went home. At the time I felt it was best to give my education all of my attention. It was like this for five days a week from August to December. I began to question if college was for me, and if I even belonged anywhere. I felt alone, clueless, and unimportant to the campus. I wasn’t use to feeling like this I was always in extracurricular activities, meeting new people, having close relationships, and being employed. After my first semester, I had enough of feeling this way and knew I had to be the person
One of the biggest “life changers” I have ever experienced is college. You get to experience a whole new atmosphere, meet tons of new people, and you get to live a new life. Going into college, most of the time, kids are nervous and scared for what their future. I was one of those students. Going into college I was quite nervous and I didn’t know what to expect. Often, I would hear how difficult college is and how much different it is than high school. I was not prepared to constantly be studying or doing homework because I was not used to doing those things in high school. I wasn’t too fond of being away from my home and my family as well, which is another reason I was skeptical about going off to college. From move in day to now, college has been such a pleasant surprise for me and I am loving it. My college writing course, General Studies Writing, or GSW, has also helped me learn quite a bit, but it could also be improved to help students learn even more than before. Overall, my college experience has been a great one and I couldn’t ask for a better start to a new life.
While looking over my transcripts, I observed that my grades for the most part either remained bad or got worse second semester. Despite how I perform in those classes I have the easiest time understanding math, and the hardest time with history. The trends in my transcript correlate to how I’ve been my entire life, I give up easily. Once the smallest thing goes wrong I give up rather than trying persevering. I choose to keep rolling down a hill because it's easier, rather than to push myself to climb it.
I believe that challenging myself to take AP classes that influence my decision in choosing a career path will be beneficial and aide me in achieving my lifetime goal of helping others. It helps me because I’m preparing myself for college by taking rigorous college level courses. Because they are difficult classes, my GPA will be weighted and thus increases my chances of being accepted into schools that can help me achieve my
My transition to college was successful, but it was nonetheless one of the most stressful times in my life. Unlike many of my peers at Saint Louis University, my rural high school experience did not truly prepare me for the academic rigors of college. Despite extensive preparation, I performed rather poorly on the first round of exams. While I didn’t fail any particular exam, my performance was seriously lacking. I knew that getting C’s on exams would not serve me well in the pursuit of my dream of becoming a physician. I remember feeling, for the first time in my life, that I was unintelligent and incompetent. I was also heavily fatigued from the excessive hours of studying, which I felt were necessary to reconcile the problem. I managed to
At first, failure was none of my business: I did not really care how high or low my grades were. But when I suddenly experienced what failure was like, I did not like it one bit. In fact, a fear started to grow within me. It was like a hideous, chupacabra-like alien had landed on my territory and I felt I had to do everything to get rid of it. I studied mathematics very hard: harder than I ever had before. I studied how to divide 9 by 3 and 8 by 4, even if I so despised numbers to my very core. I did not like them because they made things abstract to me. Things which I knew became unknown w...
When I think about my past experiences of when I failed many scenarios come to mind. Us as humans beings are bound to fail at one point in life but its how you learn from them that makes it a fundamental. I came to a realization that all my past failures have played a huge role in my life, all of which have been either a lesson or an eye opener. The most vital scenario is when I failed to make the grade point average (GPA) required by my school to run track my first year entering high school. This event played a major role in my high school life.
I was on track to become an honor grad. I was just barely above the required GPA, and I had the perseverance to keep putting all I had to reach my goal. Through my first 3 years of high school, I had above average grades, and put everything I had into becoming an honor grad. But in the middle of my senior year, “senior-itis” started to kick in. My grades had begun to drop, and the perseverance that I had started senior year with had vanished. I was accepted into college, and I no longer found a reason to continue to study like I had in the past. I stopped studying for tests, and I basically stopped trying. I would get “sick” a few times a month, and miss school. This was out of the ordinary for me. I was the kind of student that missed two or three days a year. Since I wasn’t in school, I missed a lot of lectures, and missed a lot of assignments. These assignments were graded and I could make them up, but I only did the things that were easy. Whenever the third grading term was over, which was the cut off for grades that counted to become an honor graduate, I had found out that I no longer had the GPA to be an honor grad. I had missed it by just one percentage point. At this moment, I realized that I failed. I had put more than 3 years of hard work and dedication in to become an honor grad, and I basically flushed it all down the drain during my senior year. I had let myself down, along with
When I moved into my dorm, I didn’t know what to expect in college. It was something my parents expected me to attend. For most of life, I was a sheltered boy who stayed home all the time. I didn’t hang out with friends until my last year of high school. After I come home from school, I would either finish homework or watch Youtube videos. It wasn’t until the first few days of college until I realized the amount of freedom I received. College allowed me to do what I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid. It has already taught me more than the last 18 years of my life. I’ve experienced and learned more about myself and the world around me in just the first semester and it started with my classes.
Once middle school began, classes were now split up into lanes, and furthermore validated my presumption of my intelligence, I was stupid... I didn’t put forward any effort into my schoolwork, I hovered around a 2.0 throught the whole of middle school. High school came around, alternatively, I was on the other side of the spectrum of a fixed mindset, I was overly confident about my academic ability. The article “When Capable Students Fail: The Academic Sustainability Gap Katie Hern, Chabot College”. Hern observes “They Speak of falling behind and believing they’ll catch up, but the work snowballs and they can’t recover.” This is relevant to me because I was able to get decent grades(3.3 and above) in High School by falling behind and doing all the semester’s work the week before and turning it in. I was confident that no matter how far I feel behind that everything was going to be fine. It was the second semester of my senior year, I was offered a spot on the Cal Poly San Luis
In the beginning of the semester, I thought it would be enjoyable to take Anatomy and Physiology since I had already taken it in high school and actually received a high grade. I had heard from many students that this class is much harder in college and will often have a big lecture setting with more than three-hundred students, but I brushed this off and went into the classroom with a positive attitude. I quickly learned that big lectures were not the classes that I would succeed in, instead I preferred a small classroom setting where I am able to ask questions whenever needed. Throughout the semester, I also learned that I prefer online classes when it comes to mathematics and social sciences because they can be self-taught and I found myself often uninterested during the
A recent failure that has changed how I go about my daily life is one that many college freshman experience in their first year. In high school I was a very good student, but I did not have to put in a lot of effort to get the grades that I wanted. I would joke with my friends and say that high school taught me how to put in the least amount of effort, and still get the maximum result. All of my teachers told me, as they did every student, that college was going to be different and if you do not put in more effort it would be very difficult. I knew this coming into school, but I am not sure if part of me wanted to prove people wrong, or if I actually was just adjusting to college life. I did not study as much as I should of, and as a result my grades suffered. Luckily I did not completely ruin my grade point average, but since first semester I have completely changed my study habits. This has taught a much needed lesson about hard work, and I am determined to never again fail at my studies. I am the kind of person that learns a lot from failures. My dad has always told me it is ok to make a mistake, but never make the same mistake twice. This I a motto that I live by.
Living up to my resolution, I joined several clubs, both in and out of school and academic and recreational. I also met some of my very best friends in high school. Achieving all of this, friends, memberships to academic clubs and good grades, made up my first successful experience in high school. I was driven by the years in middle school and the promise that I made to myself at the end of eighth grade. Throughout my under classmen years I exceled in all subjects and thoroughly enjoyed the clubs I had joined. I think my downfall for the last two years of school was that I took for granted my good grades and as my classes got more rigorous I didn’t change the way I learned the material, but continued on the same path that I had been following my entire academic career, even when my grades were slipping slightly. Halfway through my senior year, I realized I needed to change the way I was learning the curriculum my instructors were teaching. I’ve always been the type of student to take good notes or listen to a lecture and understand everything the first time around, as was the case in elementary school and middle school. But my more rigorous classes proved to be a challenge for me and I did not know the proper way of learning the material on my own. I started by asking more questions in class and then going to my friends for help on subjects I didn’t understand. After many questions and after school tutor