Hello, L-inois State by Joshua

Hello, L-inois State by Joshua - February 2017 Scholarship Essay

It would be hard to describe my failures in simply 200 to 900 words. That’s not meant to demean myself or to fish for compliments – my life has been built upon being torn down and having to restart from scratch. I’m just used to that, and I embrace it. It’s what drives me to succeed. Over the course of the past few months, I have endured what I would probably label as the biggest failure of my life. Hear ye, hear ye! – for I shall now tell the tale of how *not* to make the transition into college.
It begins back in my high school days, if we want to trace the whole story. Picture me as a young little boy (okay, it was less than two years ago) eager to explore the world and mature into an adult. I thought I was all high-and-mighty with my over-thirty ACT score and my nine Advanced Placement courses. I acted fairly entitled sometimes. I had my aspirations high: I was thinking about applying to either Northwestern, Cornell, or another Ivy League-level institution. Northwestern was my first option because it was my dream school growing up (first warning sign: don’t let your emotions get the best of you!).
I applied to Northwestern as an early applicant, with the University of Wisconsin as my “backup” plan. As I churned away with senioritis, awaiting my college admission decisions, I thought in my head the probabilities of potential outcomes. The best-case scenario was that I got admitted into Northwestern outright, the second-best was if I got deferred and accepted in the spring, and the worst-case scenario (in my head) was if I were to get denied by Northwestern, I would accept my Wisconsin offer.
As someone with a major in the field of statistics, I learned a very valuable personal experience about the way probability operates. A 5 percent chance is not zero. A .00001 percent chance, still, is not zero. As it turns out, I did get deferred and denied by Northwestern. What caught me off-guard, however, is that I got waitlisted by Wisconsin, which I had previously viewed as a near certainty. At this point, I was in panic mode. I did end up enrolling in Wisconsin in the middle of May, months after everyone else had decided, but it signaled the first of my many life lessons: always have a backup-backup-*backup* plan.
When I finally settled in at Madison, I did not know how much financial aid I was to receive until weeks into the semester. At that point, I was somewhat expecting a burdensome debt load. What I did not anticipate however, is that I would have no way of paying for the costs.
I thought that if I had any leftover amount owed, the university would hold my hand and figure out a loan plan. I did not realize how laid back and cutthroat reality truly was. I learned that due to my lack of credit history and lack of a valid cosigner, I was incapable of taking out any loans from banks. *That* was the biggest heartbreaker of them all, and it sent me into a minor depression for weeks and weeks.
Thus, I transferred as soon as I could to a school with a significantly lower cost of attendance: Illinois State University. Although the switch was a positive for me, I suffer the consequences of my prior actions yet again. I was deemed by the university to have “too many credit hours to be considered a freshman and too few to be considered a transfer student.” I received zero merit-based financial aid at a school that I might have received a full-ride to had I applied to just one year prior.
So here I am – applying for scholarships to finance my education. It presents me another obstacle I must overcome. I must try to be funny and witty for people reading my essays that have no clue who I am or what I’m like. I must attempt to convince you that the L’s I’ve taken in life are both hilarious and disheartening. But as I always do: for every one step backward, I take two steps forward. I’m as motivated as ever to succeed. As the great Kanye West once preached, “N-now t-t-that don’t kill me. Can only make me stronger.”