Change by Eric

Change by Eric - April 2016 Scholarship Essay

I’ve heard Mahatma Gandhi's saying, “Be the change you wish to see in the world” many times, although I never realized how to embody that change until my junior year. Throughout my freshman and sophomore years, I wouldn’t have imagined spearheading a project that would bring positive change to the community. As I grew throughout my high school years, I realized that if everyone had a follower mentality, nothing would ever change.
I finally realized what it felt like to embody that change when my advisory decided to do a “pay-it-forward” project in junior year. Originally, I figured I could just sit back during advisory and participate in whatever project that my peers decided on. After a meeting full of indecision over the type of project to enact, I finally proposed to lead a mental health awareness program, consisting of a social media competition to see which grade could spread mental health facts to the most followers. As a school, our tweeted facts ended up reaching over 700,000 different Twitter users, all over the country.
However, the importance of this project became obvious a few months later, when a student in my school chose to take his life. This event completely shocked my small school community. Although I had already completed my awareness project, this boy’s death also allowed me to reflect on my middle school and early high school years in a more positive way, using them as a learning and teaching experience, rather than something in which to be ashamed. I remember those years vividly, from the awkward social situations that middle school created, to the difficulty of balancing extracurricular activities with academic responsibilities. Those occasions when I felt like a failure because of a single bad grade now serve as a learning experience to me, and I consider my middle school years some of my most successful. I convey this to my brother and his friends often, all of whom were in this student's classes, and now beginning their high school experience. I explain to him that, just like the stock market, past performance is not indicative of future results. As soon as I realized this, I was able to see my full potential during my junior and senior years, without letting my past disappointing situations and grades result in failure, but instead be the drive I needed to succeed.