Abandoning Fear by Hannah

Abandoning Fear by Hannah - March 2019 Scholarship Essay

The most important piece of advice I would have for incoming freshmen is to abandon their fears. As I entered high school, my two biggest fears were falling through the cracks socially and academically. I spent a lot of my time worrying that I would be unprepared for things such as Advanced Placement classes, college applications, and more. Looking back on my high school experience, I wish someone had taken the time to tell me that everyone else was in the same boat as me and I didn’t need to be afraid of reaching out for help. I would have saved so much time and energy and had a lot more fun along the way.

I went to elementary school at a private institution, so I hadn’t spent my childhood with my classmates, nor was I yet a master of all things public school. I did everything I could to ensure that I wouldn’t fall behind: I clung to my friends from middle school and participated in a lot of extracurriculars such as volleyball and school clubs. I was under the impression that I would end high school with the same friends I acquired when I first entered the public school system, and I believed that my entire high school experience would be exactly like my freshman year. This has proven to be far from true. As a senior who is graduating in three months, I am still friends with many people I knew my freshman year, but some of my best friends are people I didn’t meet until this year. I have friends in every grade and from all sorts of social groups. I also believed that my interests would remain static as well. As a middle schooler and freshman, I played volleyball and was very involved in creative writing. I also spent my free time drawing and painting. However, at the end of my freshman year, I decided to stop playing volleyball and took up cross country. I discovered creative writing wasn’t something I loved enough to devote extra time to. I also grew an even greater appreciation for art. I am now the secretary of my school’s branch of National Art Honor Society and ran cross country for three years. I was worried about losing friends and failing to find activities that interested me, but looking back on my high school experience, I now know that I didn’t need to be concerned. I worked hard at becoming more likable to others, but the true purpose of high school is to discover who I am, not who my friends want me to be.

Transitioning from a private school to a public school, there was some dissonance between what I had been taught and what public schools taught. I was able to make up for this gap in middle school, but I still wondered if there would be things about high school classes that I wasn’t prepared for. On the first day of my first Advanced Placement class, I was petrified and intimidated. I quickly found out that I was in the same boat as most of my peers, though, and I felt relieved. My teachers offered extra help during lunch period and hosted study sessions before exams. Even if I had been falling behind academically, my teachers offered so many ways for me to study and get specialized help that I would have been able to catch up. As an upperclassman, my school counselors offered so many college resources such as financial guides, scholarship guides, class recommendations, academic fairs, and more. Without approaching anyone, I was provided with the assets I needed to successfully search for and apply to colleges. I did go to a couple of counselors with questions I had, but all in all, my school took care of me without me asking them to, which proved my fears wrong.

If I could change anything about my high school experience, it would be how much I worried about getting everything right. My friends, grades, and interests developed without the help of fear or stress, which is why I would strongly advise freshmen to trust the process. I would have had much more fun if I hadn’t been so busy worrying about who was my friend or what my GPA was. Fear keeps a person from venturing out of his or her comfort zone, but in the end, this is what high school is about. This is how growth occurs.