Challenges are Opportunities by Ian

Challenges are Opportunities by Ian - June 2016 Scholarship Essay

Allow me to set the stage. It was the end of first semester my freshman year. At that time I had had a serious wakeup call on the work that was required to succeed in college. Finals were optional at my high school so it is safe to say I was unprepared for college exams. Thankfully only two of my four classes had exams. However, three of them required final papers. The largest of these papers was a twelve page philosophy paper on the ethics of steroid use in bodybuilding. This paper was followed up by a ten minute speech. There was also a persuasive paper in my English class. This one was ten pages. The smallest, and hardest to write, was for a history class. This one was eight pages. It didn’t end there. For biology we had to create our own lab and make a presentation on our results. This kind of work load was unheard of in my high school and apparently my roommate didn’t share my stress levels the final weeks of that semester.
I’m not sure how, but I finished each assignment. It took some cramming, some loss of sleep, and some deep inner reflection, but I did it. If you have been there I don’t have to tell you how awful it was. If you haven’t, then let me tell you that during times like these one experiences a truly awful sense of fear. One may even question if college is for them before completing these kinds of tasks.
I’m happy to say that this changed the way I looked at challenges forever. There is a time in all of our lives where we will look at a dilemma and think it unconquerable. We say to ourselves, “There isn’t enough time”, “I don’t have the knowledge”, or “I’m never going to finish this”. We tend to look at problems as hundreds of flights of stairs when we should be focusing on one step at a time, because what follows is simply another step. After some time and much perseverance, no matter how stressful eventually you will take that last step. I had to ask myself countless times, “How bad do you want this?” The beautiful part of this is there will always be another “impossible situation”. But now, because I’ve overcome one dilemma I have an idea of what it will take to conquer the next one, and the next and the next. This is the lesson I took from freshman year: We all carry with us the strength from our past struggles so we are prepared to face future adversity.