Defining A Point of Failure In My Life by Alyssa

Defining A Point of Failure In My Life by Alyssa - February 2017 Scholarship Essay

Failure; “n. lack of success”. The word used to describe someone who has completely given up on trying to be successful, and that is exactly what I chose not to let myself become. We all go through these phases where everything doesn’t always work out the way we planned, but no matter how big or small the issue is, it just sticks in your memory because it impacted you in some way. Personally, I’d rather take these instances and build from them, make myself better, and show that I can overcome them instead of allowing them to swallow my possibilities. Failure is just a label, and people can only learn from these times that we label as period of failure, so let me share mine.
Recollecting all of my academics and how I got to where I am, I hold on to one of the numerous times of when I didn’t do how I expected. It was a goal for me to enroll into Geometry once I had the chance to as an incoming freshman and thought I could do it. Going into the test I had high hopes and felt confident in my skills in math, but little did I know that the few too many questions I would miss would put me in as a student in an Algebra 1C class. There was no problem with taking Algebra, I just had higher expectations for myself and wanted the challenge of a higher level of math. As the announcement day came, I anxiously waited for my eighth grade math teacher to say my name in the list of people who passed, but came to be disappointed in myself. Unhappy with my results, my teacher explained there was a way for me to get where I wanted to be in my education. Summer school.
Sure, summer school wasn’t my ideal plan of how I wanted to spend part of my summer, but I was willing to do what it took to be where I expected myself to be and having some of my friends in that class made getting up early on my supposed-to-be break a little more bearable. So, I stuck out the 5 or so weeks that I had to go and hoped for the best on the test I eventually had to take at the end of the course to get moved up into geometry. After taking the test, I felt confident in myself like the last time but quickly became wary that it didn’t mean a thing considering the past results. The day following was the last day of summer school or in other words, test score reveal day. The teacher began to pass out the little white slips of paper with the results and as I peered at the green checks next to the question numbers I came to see that I not only had passed, but got a perfect score.
As an incoming freshman, I was able to enroll in honors geometry, following with honors algebra two, and in my junior year I reached my highest level of math of honors precalculus. I have passed each year of math successfully and now thank myself that I pushed myself to go to summer school. There were definitely those times where I was taking it for granted because of the hours I spent on doing what felt like millions of math problems, but at least I understood it. Not only was I able to take higher math classes, but allowed myself to help other students excel by being a peer tutor for algebra and geometry in my elective courses. People try to take failure and make it completely negative, but in my case it motivated me to make something better of myself.