The Quick Fix to Failure by Devan

The Quick Fix to Failure by Devan - April 2019 Scholarship Essay

One major academic challenge I faced was taking the ACT. All throughout elementary and middle school, when state testing came around, I dreaded it. I had never been good at timed-testing and hated the fact that I would freeze up to the point of being incapable of answering simple questions that I would otherwise answer with ease. So, when the ACT came around I was disappointed with my score. Being an honor student that takes her education seriously, I was upset that I couldn’t seem to do as well on the test as I knew I could. With each try I seemed to be making little progress, while my friends were all getting much higher scores than me. I took an ACT Prep course, studied the material online, and used any resource I could find on how to best prepare, but nothing seemed to work.

When it got to December of this past year, I was done stressing myself out. I was putting too much pressure on myself, and I was tired of it. It was the middle of my senior year and I knew if I didn’t improve on this last score than that was it and I would move on. I went into that test, calm, collected, and honestly not caring about the score I got. I knew whatever it was that I got, it wouldn’t matter in the grand scheme of life. When the test scores finally came in, I was expecting little to no change in my scores. However, when I opened that document, I thought I hallucinated. For a solid ten seconds I couldn’t process what I saw before my eyes. My score had jumped by four points! Every single category had increased in score. It was then that I realized, the only thing holding me back from getting the score I knew I could was the pressure I put on myself and the fear I had of failing. That day I learned that the best way to prevent failure is to stop fearing it.