Gifted, Yet Growing by Gabrielle

Gifted, Yet Growing by Gabrielle - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

Being a “gifted” honors student for most of my educational years has changed my thinking for both the better and worse. Of course, something like that shows that I have worked hard for the title that I have earned. Countless assignments meant to prepare me for advanced work and college culminated in me finally showing up to graduation in a cap and gown, waving to my family in the crowd. However, with a high standing in school came a boosted ego. I thought the work was trivial, given how little I had to study for the majority of it. The work could be done at the last minute, and for Beta Club and Honors Society, I just had to keep up with school and do some community work. I thought everything would just breeze by and lead me to success.

That was before I realized that college would be completely different. What was once something I could glance at and pass turned into work that was actually challenging to keep up with if I did not give it the attention it needed. Work piled on if I even wasted a single second not doing it, and eventually I realized that my teachers were right. College was much harder than high school. The main class that changed that thinking was the Freshman Honors Leadership Symposium I took during my first year. It taught me about leadership and how to build my character to help support myself and my classmates. This was the first time that I truly learned what it meant to be an honors student and that being “gifted” was something you actually had to work for.

The class was structured from Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, with work being based on each of the seven habits. I was grouped with people who had the same major, and we had to work together to finish assignments as well as do solo work. Still following the bad habits I built up during my previous years, I did not bother with doing things at a good pace, but of course, that caught up with me. I managed to scrape by with minimal work, but it did not feel good. Once I looked back on my work, I realized that those very lessons about self-improvement could be applied to me.

You see, the book gives you advice on how to go from dependence to interdependence while maintaining good structure. I discovered that I was a mainly dependent person who relied on others to get what I wanted. I ended up re-reading the book and discussing parts of it with both my counselor and friends who were also in the honors college alongside me. One of the biggest takeaways I grasped from the book was the time management matrix, which divides tasks into four quadrants ranging from urgent and important to not urgent and not important. Procrastination is something I struggled with and still struggle with today, and in the future, I want to utilize this tool that I glanced at the first time I was taught about it. I also wanted to think more about my own character and what I wanted to contribute to. Things finally clicked for me.

Being “gifted” means you already possess a natural talent for something, but I think that being truly gifted means you actually need to maintain that gift and use it to help others. Having a gift does not mean that you are set for life or are better than everyone, and therefore have to do nothing to strive; it means you have something that you can nurture. I encourage everyone to challenge themselves to put hard work into everything, and I plan on doing just that myself.