After school Star by Claudia

After school Star by Claudia - September 2015 Scholarship Essay

It was 8 pm and I was still waiting for my mom at my aunt’s house. I knew she would arrive to pick me up soon though. Then we could finally go home together and rest until the next day where the cycle would start all over again.
Since very early on in my academic career I have learned to be a very self-motivated and independent individual. During my middle school years my single mom worked long hours as a bank teller so I, in turn, went to an after school program in Mount Gleason Middle School, located in Tujunga California, called All-Stars. I was always one of the last kids to leave from the program, but even when I left I did not go home because only my aunt could pick me up at that time. She drove me to her house where I usually stayed until 8 pm until my mom finally came to pick me up.
It was during that time that I realized there was no one who was really there to push me to do well in school except for myself. My mom was always busy working and on her day off we would do something fun together like play sports or go to the library, my favorite place at the time. She always wanted the best for me and wanted me to have the best opportunities, which is why she felt she had to work long arduous hours at her job. I recognized that since my mom had the responsibility of working in order to support us then I had the responsibility to work hard and excel academically as a student. I made school my number one priority. This was not easy to do because as I looked around at my peers in the after school program I stayed at, I saw that other students, whose parents also worked late hours, didn’t feel compelled to work like I did. Why should they? They were free to do anything they wanted- there wasn’t anyone there to tell us otherwise. It seemed very logical to take advantage of that freedom and just have fun instead of doing schoolwork. We were all technically still children, so how could we be expected to motivate ourselves to work? However, I never viewed it in that way. I wanted to work equally as hard as my mom because I felt that by working hard in school I was helping my mom so she wouldn’t have to worry about my academics. I strove for A’s and succeeded in getting them. Through this experience I became a very self-motivated person with a strong work ethic that continues to strive to do better and advance on to higher levels of learning.