essay 1

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.

Although I was a different person in high school, it is possible for people to truly change if they put their mind to it. In high school, I really did not care about my grades. My attendance was awful, skipping too many classes to count. I barely managed to pull off a 3.0 GPA by the end of my senior year. When I came to college, I knew grades were important but I did not realize how challenging it was to get above a 3.0 in college.

I Screwed Up! High school is a strange time. After three years of trying to develop identity and friends in middle school, students are expected to mature immediately on the first day of ninth grade, but I never did this. I never fully realized in the earlier grades how important high school success, as measured by GPA, would be to my future life, and as a result I am applying to college with seemingly contradictory measures of my ability to perform college-level work. If I had worked and studied hard rather than hanging out with friends and viewing high school as an opportunity to socialize, I would not have to apply to school with a 1300 SAT and a 2.7 GPA.

I’m proud to be in America because if I was in Vietnam I would have done same job as my parents did in America. Education is what had made me become successful throughout elementary to 2 high school because it had prepared me for college. Back then when I went to school I would just think of school a place where I get to talk to my friends and have fun. I was not gifted and I did not work hard either because school was a place where I felt my parents would force me to go to. I would never had made it to college if I gave up on education because my senior year I felt really lazy and I didn’t know what to... ... middle of paper ... ...tion is sometimes taken for granted because I feel like I don’t need to learn a certain subject in college but yet I need it to involve in the real world when getting a job.

I did the bare minimum at school just to get that passing grade. As I entered high school, there was a fear that this might be somewhat challenging. That fear quickly went away. Attending a high school within a lower economical area of the city, I was left to my free will. Of course the words of my mother were always in the back of my mind, but how was I to comprehend it?

Statement of Purpose My career aspiration of becoming an educator didn’t grow overnight. I went to college for a pre-business degree in hopes of being the next “hot shot” in the Financial District of San Francisco. However, instead of focusing my time on business courses, I always found myself volunteering at the local elementary school or divulging myself in my Education courses. I realized I had a passion for education at that point as I was actually earning way better grades in Education courses than my major courses. Upon graduating from UC Davis, I was in a lull, I had no idea what I wanted to do.

It was important that I go to a good university or I won’t be able to get a good job when I graduated. Even though, I didn’t rank as high as I was in middle school, I was doing well enough on my exams; my counselor and teachers told me that I might be able to go to any universities of my choosing. I was very relieved and satisfied with myself; this was my life goal after all. The life of a high schooler was much harder and more completed than a middle schooler. I had to study every day to keep up with the amount of materials that were given out in class—they were much deeper and complicated.

In the beginning of my freshman year, I was very excited about coming to Howard University because I fell in love with the school. In my first year I took about 18 credit hours convinced that college would be similar to high school. My first semester felt extremely overwhelming, I thought that I could handle my classes, and I convinced myself that I did not need help but I had only proved by the end of that semester that I was wrong. I did not know how to study well, and I could rely on my “smarts” to get me through classes that were rigorous. I enrolled myself without counseling in Spanish 2, calculus 1, and freshman composition and I struggled the entire way, my pride just would not let me admit that I needed help.

In high school, the most important things to me weren’t the people, the experiences, the parties or any of that; I prided myself on my work. Now that isn’t all bad because it got me the grades to get into my dream school, but I think that I lost of what could have been a great four years of my life. I’m glad that I’ve had that experience though because now I realize you need balance. You can have fun and do you school work too, you just have to stay organized and on top of things. I’m really hoping that this will be a great five years for me, and that my writing will improve over the course of this semester.

4-year schools require an incredible amount of maturity and preparation, leaving very little room for mistakes. Schools often overlook this aspect because their main goal is to get as many students into 4-year college as possible. This is a great goal to have however they send students off to college who aren’t ready to be handle the difficult of their courses while being away from home. My senior year of high school, my family and I came to the conclusion that we were not going to be able to afford four-year college tuition. This upset me at first because I felt like all my hard work and good grades went to waste.