10% by Kayla

10% by Kayla - July 2023 Scholarship Essay

Armed with four mechanical pencils and two wooden ones, I opened my test packet to the first page. “AP Calculus AB Unit 1 Exam,” it mocked me as I stared at the cluttered paper. I scanned the page in bewilderment, not a clue of how to even begin a single problem. I wrote my name, basically the only question I seemed to know the answer to. For what seemed like hours I stared at the equations on the four-page packet, my eyes cloudy from the tears that had started to flow. I scribbled hilariously nonsensical attempts on the paper as my brain ran furiously with stress. It seemed impossible to do any kind of math when the only thing I could think about was how there would be absolutely no way I would take AP Calculus BC next semester. Stress and despair clouded my brain as I stared at the derivative equations that may as well have been written in Mandarin characters. The lunch bell rang, and I begrudgingly gave my tear-stained damp paper of guesswork to my teacher, whose green eyes looked at me with sympathy, and I walked off.
Monday arrived, the day I’d been dreading all weekend. My teacher handed me back my test, the same sorry look on her face she wore last Friday. Careful to hide my paper from anyone sitting around me, I cautiously unfolded it, only to see “10%” written in bright blue ink right next to my name. Although the choice of blue rather than red pen was a subtle generosity, it did nothing for me. I excused myself to the restroom, completely distraught. I knew for certain I would fail the class. There was absolutely no coming back from this, not in a class where tests are worth 60% of the grade, no way. I used to be good at math, whatever could have happened? My mind raced, imagining what horrific situations I would find the rest of my life endimg up in, as the girl who failed calculus. The girl who couldn’t even get past the first exam of the first semester of the first course of calculus.
I have finished calculus now. I have completed AP Calculus BC with a 5 on the AP exam. And despite my 10% on my first unit one exam, I ended with an A that semester, as well as every other semester I took. Just one year ago, I thought for sure I would never be able to do calculus, and that my academic life was over. That grade, in my mind, was non-recoverable. A death sentence to my transcript. But things didn’t turn out that way, although I was certain they would.
Sometimes, inevitably, you will fail. And that's okay. Failing at something doesn't make you a failure, as long as you use that experience as motivation to do even better. I could have easily just dropped the class and quit in fear of receiving a bad final grade, but instead, I learned that one failure will not define how you turn out—it is how you react and continue forward. I almost did drop the class. But rather than quit, I worked even harder to make sure I learned the material and did the best in the class that I could. Now not just do I understand what an integral is, but more importantly, I understand the reality that one bad situation, one failure, one misfortune, does not define your end result. It is not the 10% of setbacks that hurts your ambitions. Instead, it is the perseverance you put in to make sure that that 10% stays just 10%. It is the 90% of successes that you find through hard work that determine your results. Instead of using those setbacks as weights to hold you back, use them as starting blocks to push off, and keep going, even faster, and farther, than before.