Maintaining My Habits by Isabella

Maintaining My Habits by Isabella - September 2026 Scholarship Essay

The first step I had to developing and maintaining good study habits is simple: make a plan. Not just for what I want to accomplish day-to-day, but understanding my long-term goals will make it easier to figure out how to reach them. What I like to do at the beginning of every week is to figure out everything I need to be preparing for, and order them with respect to importance, length of the task, and when it is due. This also involves being mindful of any plans or interruptions from my work, and to organize when I’ll do certain assignments around my schedule. While I can usually rely on my teachers to have the week’s work planned out on Canvas, the web-based learning management system, new tasks can still pop up throughout the week, which is why it is important to be flexible. Big test coming up? Set aside a time to study every day, even if it's only for thirty minutes. Knowing how I’m going to prepare is vital for success.
While the planning stage is important, its effects can be nullified if I don’t know what exactly I should study to maximize growth. This means that when preparing for a big test or quiz, I need to focus most on what I do not understand instead of the things that I do. While it can be easier to review the things I’m confident in, the skills that I’m weaker in take priority while studying. Being deliberate with my habits also means knowing my limits. If I know that I have two difficult and time-consuming tests or assignments due around similar times, I’ll either work on both each day for shorter periods of time or take more time for each but do them on alternating days. If I overwork myself and try to do everything immediately, I’ll only burn myself out. Understanding how I work best and being intentional with my work is how I’ve managed to improve my study habits so much over the last few years.
Everything I’ve described so far– the planning, introspection, and conscious efforts– are important, but the one thing that truly changed my perspective was knowing that they mean nothing without consistency. Repeating a similar action over and over again, in this case, continuing to study effectively for an extended period of time, allows one to acquire a pattern of behavior called a habit. Creating new habits and breaking bad ones is very difficult. Our brains are wired in a way to allow us to do the smallest amount of work possible in order to focus energy on other tasks, meaning that until I can form that habit and it becomes automatic, putting time and resources towards it will take up more effort than I want to give. This is why maintaining my work towards more efficient studying is so important. If I actively choose to continue weekly planning sessions, study days, and homework hours, maintenance will turn from a sharp readjustment of bad habits to a slight recalibration of already good ones.
Academic success can be measured in different ways, whether it be GPA or AP scores. While the numbers getting better over the years may show improvement, it fails to encapsulate the work I took to get to this point. The goal setting, the reworking of old habits, and the dedication I had to stick with the new ones. These are all defining factors of my success. Anyone can be smart, but it took set goals and consistent efforts in order for me to excel in my studies.