What has been your biggest failure during your education and how has it shaped who you are as a person? by Kamille

What has been your biggest failure during your education and how has it shaped who you are as a person? by Kamille - July 2023 Scholarship Essay

My biggest failure during my education has been my freshman year and realizing I wanted to switch majors. I love science and was determined to be a neuroscience major with a minor in business administration. I was so excited my freshman year and looked forward to biology and chemistry. I truly loved science in high school and excelled at it. As I entered my first semester of my freshman year, I started to realize my love for science was fading. I became uninterested and withdrawn. I struggled to maintain interest and good grades. I was starting to feel like a failure and a disappointment. I finished my first semester and dreaded heading into spring. I became completely withdrawn and detached from my program. I ended up dropping to part time and finishing the semester with six credit hours. It was an absolute struggle to even maintain the six credit hours. Spring semester was a disaster and so was I.

I felt like a complete failure. I had to regroup and decide what I wanted to pursue long term. I really thought I wanted to attend medical school, but that dream faded and no longer existed. This was definitely humbling. I never had such low grades and felt lost. After some sole searching and great therapy, I realized it is ok change paths. Feeling comfortable acknowledge that I needed to change paths was life altering. I always stayed the course even when I knew it was not for me. I finally felt strong enough to change paths. I decided to follow my interests in political science while maintaining my minor in business administration. I also realized I can pursue another interest and will obtain a second minor in psychology. Since changing my major, I have excelled personally and, in the classroom, and raised my GPA to a 3.52. Since my freshman year, I have taken summer courses to catch up and maintain my GPA. While I feel I have turned things around, these accomplishments came with some setbacks. Attending college is not a simple task and navigating through COVID did not help.

While my freshman year was very stressful, It helped shape who I am today, a pretty humbling but yet honest person. I learned many valuable lessons. I learned that it is okay to fail, it develops character and mental toughness. I learned it is okay to be unsure of what you want to do in life. At eighteen years old I did not know everything and surely was not expected to know everything, despite what I thought. I learned to speak my truth and hold myself accountable for my successes and most importantly my failures. Holding myself accountable also meant that I had to work hard all year around if I wanted to graduate withing four years. Taking summer courses and giving up part of the school free summer lifestyle was not in the cards for me. Maxing out my schedule and taking eighteen credit hours a semester was a result of being accountable. While I do feel switching majors and not performing great my freshman was one of my biggest failures, it was also the building block for one of my greatest successes. I learned to measure part of my success not simply with grades, but also personal growth and development. I learned how to seek help and be honest with myself. I learned if I cannot be honest with myself, I can never truly move forward in life. I realize success is normally built on a failure and without failures there might not be one’s greatest success.