Academic Adversity by Joseph

Academic Adversity by Joseph - April 2019 Scholarship Essay

As a student the most academically challenging thing I've ever faced probably came last year. As a high school student taking college classes I have become accustomed to harder work, but when I signed up for classes during the summer, there would be aspects that I was completely unaccustomed to.
Those aspects that I would be unprepared for would be the sheer amount of work and the length of the classes. Being used to short, fifty minute courses, suddenly taking multiple two hour classes was a shock due to me being used to the ability to move around or rest my mind in between classes. This alone would not be too bad, but as a normal course is being crammed into a months time, the courses themselves also had much more work within them. Having to churn out essays multiple times a week left me feeling strained and I knew that I had to find someway to rectify my situation.
For the first of my woes the only real solution that I had was to become more patient and to try and have a larger attention span in classes which was something that I had to either do or not do. Tackling the greater workloads was something that I had to face a different way. I knew that I would have to become more studious than I was, but I feel that I made a pretty large change to become able to cope with the workloads. I found myself studying and doing work for up to four hours in between classes, something that I would have never done before. Rather than procrastinating, I was turning in assignments early so that I wouldn't all behind in another one of the classes. I recognized that changes had to be made if I was going to make it through, and I was truly surprised when I managed to follow through. Overall it was a learning experience that I felt helped me change for the better and discover a part of myself that I didn't know was there.