Freshman Year of Life by Bryson

Freshman Year of Life by Bryson - March 2019 Scholarship Essay

For a lot of us, high school is often a large and intimidating step forward in our lives, but a necessary one nonetheless. I didn't understand where this all lead until my senior year but looking back it's quite obvious. In a very short four years you will be an adult, getting ready to make big decisions and start your life. The choices you make in high school will impact the rest of your life.
I spent the first few years of high school doing my work but rarely giving it my all. It's easy just to glide through the days of boredom, pass your classes and just hang out with friends but doing so puts you at a disadvantage. If you want to achieve your dreams you must put in the work and live through the grit because everyone want to live their dream, but most people never actually change their habits to make that dream come true. If you want to live your dream, you must be the one to make it happen. One strategy I used to do better in my classes was to learn to love to learn. I know this sounds dumb but actually learning the subjects I hated the most opened my eyes to how interconnected every subject really is. Thanks to the stress and work I put into pre-calculus, I dramatically improved my understanding and love for subjects like chemistry or music, putting me at an advantage if I work with those fields in the future.
Even if you don't want to go to college, your classes are important. It is important to understand, at least generally, how the world around you works because without a base knowledge, advancing and improving your career will be more difficult. For instance, if you decide to become a police officer, it will be important for you to know some biology to understand how to save a victim’s life, but if you paid attention in heath and took the opportunity to get certified to perform CPR at your school, you will already be ahead of the game.
High school is not a place everyone goes to waste their time. If you want to succeed in getting to wherever it is you want to be in life, now is the time to start. Your life doesn’t start after you graduate high school, it starts the day you become aware that this is the only life you will be given. High school is the first real chance you will get to work towards your dreams and if you squander it because you lacked the work ethic in high school, you will regret it the rest of your life.