My Best Failure by Caitlin

My Best Failure by Caitlin - February 2017 Scholarship Essay

In the past eighteen years, my educational goals have not once changed. Ultimately the aim of education is to better oneself and one's future, but in a matter of four years my perspective and motivation for those goals has drastically changed my direction. I started the most important part of my academic career, freshman year, with only three expectations for myself: score a 30 on the ACT, be valedictorian, and become a criminal behavioral analyst. However, if senior year has taught me one thing about life, it taught me that the goals we set for ourselves in high school are sometimes only romanticized aspirations. Often times life, in the end, will take us down a much different path.

The four years I spent at Cache High School have been a long road to self-discovery, and every pit stop I made along the way has become a defining point in my life. My freshman year, I had to stop at the Spanish class every student dreads taking in high school, and at the time, I did not know the impact it would have on me. I did not know that it would become the passion I would carry on with me to college, and I certainly did not know that it would change everything I had planned for myself since seventh grade. All I knew was that this would be the biggest challenge I had faced to date, and I was terrified. Regardless, I was not going to let one bump on the road to success stop me from being valedictorian, so I swallowed my fear and focused all my energy on passing this roadblock. However, after just one week, I- a straight A student- made my first D on a test. I was beyond distraught at the thought of being anything less than advanced, but my Spanish teacher, Mrs. Murr, continued to encourage me. She herself failed her first Spanish test, so she hung it up on the wall to remind all her students that hard work can overcome any obstacle.With this in mind, I decided to see this experience as a lesson rather than a shortcoming and turned it into motivation. I studied for this class harder than I had studied for any class before, and in the midst of the struggle, I did, in fact, end the year with an A, but I also fell in love with Spanish along the way.

I continued to study Spanish as I advanced in my high school career but decided to take another pit stop along the way at wrestling during my sophomore year. I started at the low end of the totem pole my first year as a manager, being required to pick up much of the slack that the senior manager left behind. My responsibilities included cleaning, sanitizing and taping mats, doing laundry, making sandwiches, filling out paperwork etc. Although this may not sound like a very glamorous job, it taught me the importance of diligence and accountability, that hard work is not limited to what I want to do, but also applies to what I need to do. I dedicated countless hours toward making sure even the smallest details were taken care of in order to ensure optimum efficiency and minimize problems. Two years later, I am now the head manager, and my current position has stretched me beyond my comfort zone requiring that I train upcoming managers, maintain communication with related parties, organize parent meetings and grocery rotations, and network with other wrestling programs. Regardless of the amount of my free time that wrestling has consumed, it has ultimately been the most rewarding experience I have had in high school as it gave me another support system and family.

These two small pit stops have become monumental landmarks in defining who I am as a person. Spanish taught me the importance of persevering through my struggles, and being a wrestling manager has tested my patience. Both of these lessons have fortified my character over the past four years and prepared me for the most important failures of my life to date. Come senior year, I have a 29 on my ACT, I am ranked 3rd in my class, and I have decided to become a teacher. While I failed to meet my initial expectations for myself, I choose to see this as a blessing. My senior year has taught me how to not only overcome disappointment but also how to see value in myself in spite of it. This is a lesson that few millennials learn in these short four years of self-discovery. Therefore, I believe that I am walking out of high school a better-rounded student than I had even envisioned for myself when I started, and I am going to have a brighter future because of it.