Seize an opportunity by Joshua

Seize an opportunity by Joshua - November 2014 Scholarship Essay

The best thing you can do for your education is to become the most active member of your education. You have to take initiative; ask questions, do more work than is required, read books that aren’t part of a course. It is clichéd but true, whatever you put into your education is what you will get out of it. Having trouble with a math class; ask for help, go look up videos of lectures online, re read the chapter. Doing well in math; try to get a chapter ahead, look up math they don’t teach in school, try and prove a math theorem on your own. For literature or history, view the syllabus as a starting point. Devour books on anything that you find interesting.

The time we live in is extremely lucky in this regard, you can find an endless stream of information on any topics you might find interesting from aviation to zoology. The Internet and more traditional resources like libraries are a boundless supply of potential enlightenment, you should make it your mission to do everything you can with those resources. There are a million subjects you can learn about, and any number of paths for learning each. Find whatever methods let you learn best, and go as far as you can whenever you have time to spend on learning. Whether that means watching lectures of college classes and trying to keep up or reading to build a better foundational understanding of a field doesn’t really matter. Treat anything that is educational as valuable, and seize every chance to learn that you can grab.

Ultimately, this is about choosing to go after the best opportunities for your life instead of taking as absolute whatever situation you happen to be in. Get out there and start making your own opportunities. School is an extremely valuable chance to learn things and the biggest resource you have; however, it is only part of the picture. You get to decide when and how you learn outside of school, and the sky is the limit for what you do with that chance . Reading for its own sake, studying for recreation, making learn a hobby; these are examples of treating your choices like they really matter because they do in fact really matter.

That’s the best advice I have for you, go learn. Go learn for your own sake, go learn because an education is valuable, and go learn because it is fun.