The Ultimate Teenager Strategy by Emma

The Ultimate Teenager Strategy by Emma - December 2017 Scholarship Essay

School projects are pretty close to the top of the list in terms of things I hate most about school. Don’t get me wrong, I actually like school and learning and it shows through my class choices and grades. It’s just that I am almost exclusively a visual and auditory learner, and tangible hands on projects has little effect on expanding my knowledge. Not to mention projects tend to mean group projects, which is a whole battle of trying to urge my groupmates into putting in at least minimal effort to secure a decent grade, only to end up finishing the project by myself in fear of getting anything less than a B+. So already right off the bat, a school project is met with my subconscious already resisting the anticipated work. Not a great start.
Due to this intense dread I feel for this project, I like to start off by putting the project off to the side and procrastinating, quite aggressively I might add. This is a great time for me to clean my room, do my laundry, finish reading my romance novel I started over the summer and didn't finish due to it predictable boringness (but you never know, it might get better!). I like to really take the time I have allotted to work on this project by having existential crisis, pondering about my life and whether I am happy with how it is panning out, how I could change it. I suddenly remember my nostalgic love for piano that I had quit years ago and attempt to play Beethoven Symphony 9 for about 30 minutes before I remember why I quit piano in the first place. It was a good effort though.
After a few days of this, I am hit with the realization that my project is now due in 24 hours. Lack of time eliminates many of my project format options of a poster (lack of materials), video (lack of effort and actors), and a model made out of food (lack of materials, effort, and just a preposterous idea in the first place). So I have to settle with a quick and easy Google PowerPoint. I open Slides and take about 10-15 minutes deciding on the theme, as the background color and font style obviously has a major impact on how my presentation will be perceived. A quick Google search using the top 5 websites that show up, and I have mostly the extent of my project’s information. I scrounge up a shrivel of motivation deep inside of me, and work hard for about 20 minutes before a desperate need for a break and a snack pulls me away from my computer.
The next day, about 20 minutes before my project is due, I am hit with the dreaded realization that I had never returned to my project after my snack break. The clock is ticking as I dash back to my computer in panic, and throw together what should have been one to two hours of work in 15 minutes driven by pure adrenaline. The regret of procrastinating sets in deep, and the brain power that isn’t being used for the scramble to finish the powerpoint is used to curse myself for being such an idiot typical teenager. By some power in God, I finish the powerpoint with half a minute to spare, smoothed over enough to look like significant effort was put into it. As I come off of the adrenaline high, I relax knowing I managed to pull it off and promise myself to never approach a project so poorly again (which I happen to conveniently forget the moment another project is assigned to us).
By the way, I got an -A. As Bert Lance once said, “if it still works, don't fix it!”