Looking Beyond by Benjamin

Looking Beyond by Benjamin - August 2019 Scholarship Essay

The feeling of being so overwhelmed with what’s directly in front of you that you can’t plan ahead isn’t one I’m a stranger to. Every day it feels like I’m planning only one or two weeks in advance with no real idea where my life is headed. Despite how much I try to plan for the future and think about my goals in life, I’m always distracted by what’s right in front of me and what I have to get done right now.
I feel like a lot of people would try to do some grand adventure, try to change their perspective on the world by exploring the world, and volunteering to help others in some remote part of the world. While that sounds incredible and I’d certainly like to do something as interesting and amazing as that, I can’t lie and say that I would. I’m not someone who can just drop everything and try to do some extraordinary task. I would try for a year focussed on nailing down what I want, and figuring out how to obtain everything I need to set me up for success.
I’d start this gap year by getting as many hours as I could at my part-time job to not only allow me to become more self-sufficient and less reliant on my parents, but also to allow me to build a reserve of cash to make college more affordable and something that I would even be able to attend. While I would be hunting down scholarships and doing everything in my power to ensure that the college I attend is cheap, it’s impossible to get around the fact that I’m going to need money. By working I would be able to build that financial base that I would need to get into a good school, without going into massive debt.
My second plan during the gap year would be to enroll in a few classes at my local community college that span subjects I am interested in majoring in. I still have a few areas that I consider my strong points and I have no idea what I which I want to do as a career. By taking a few classes I could get a more realistic idea of what I would be doing in college and doing in the real world, and this would allow me to hopefully make a much more informed decision about the major I pick. With all the responsibilities I have in high school to clubs, teams, classes, and my family I haven’t had enough time to fully research what I want to do and what major I truly want to pursue. Many people seem to have a calling, or career they’ve wanted since they were a kid, but I have yet to discover something like that and could use this time to hopefully realize what I want to do.
While taking these classes would be a good start to finding out what career I want it can only give me so much of the picture. In addition to doing this I would do research on the colleges I want to attend and the majors they offer trying to find the one that is the best fit for me, or the one that I can envision myself pursuing. By using this year as a way to gain more knowledge into what the careers I’m interested in and looking into how to pursue them I would hope to paint a clearer picture of the world around me and help make my decision a truly informed one.
In addition to all of this, I would take time to step back from everything and just think. Think about what I enjoyed during high school, and what I want to continue to learn going forward. I don’t need to move across the world and experience a ton of new things to know that I haven’t seen all that life has to offer yet. While it sounds nice to try and widen my horizons, I’d prefer to reflect. I’d reflect on what I want out of life, and how I can take the next steps to achieve that. Just sitting around doing nothing may be easier, but it’s the one surefire way I know to end up unsatisfied and full of regret. Regret that I didn’t think harder about what I wanted to do with my life and try to see what I want to do before I lock myself down a path where I dread waking up each day. The main thing that I want is to give myself more time to look to the future and escape from only looking a day ahead. I want to be able to control the path I go down and would use this time to get as much control as I could.
If I were to take a gap year I would use it to stop looking at what’s right in front of me. I would try to look further into the future and use the time to prepare myself for college in a way that would allow me to feel prepared for what I’m getting into and know I will succeed. I would try to stop being overwhelmed and start being prepared for the next chapter of my life.