Dress for Success by Jacquelyn

Dress for Success by Jacquelyn - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

When I was a sophomore in high school, I took my first advanced placement physics class. These classes are designed to be rigorous and challenging. My teacher was Mr. Butcher, an elderly gentleman that loved anything and everything physics.

On the first day of class Mr. Butcher went over the syllabus, which detailed all of his expectations for the upcoming school year. Most of the rules were straightforward and coincided with the school handbook, except for one. He had a policy that if you dressed up on a test day you would get ten extra points on your test. At the time none of us understood the relevance to "dressing for success." Mr. Butcher explained to us that, in life, there were going to be times where you would have to dress nice in order to command a certain level of respect. He further went on to say that most of those situations would revolve around a circumstance with some higher level of difficulty. He equated the tests that he administered to the difficulties in life that we were sure to face.

Mr. Butcher's test days were something we all began to look forward to. We felt grown up and responsible, while developing a level of camaraderie and community at the same time. To this day, any time that I know I might face a challenge, have an important meeting, or even just feel under the weather, I think back to Mr. Butcher and I "dress for success."