Don't Sweat It by Laura

Don't Sweat It by Laura - April 2016 Scholarship Essay

If someone were to give me a time machine, the first thing I would want to do is go back in time to my freshman year self to give myself some important advice: Don't sweat it. What I mean by this is that high school is about way more than just taking the hardest classes possible, and that one bad grad in an AP class is not the end of the world.

When I was younger, I was obsessed with taking the hardest classes that were available to me and getting straight A's. I remember during my freshman year, I was so worried about getting perfect grades so that I could get into a good college, that I stayed up until midnight every night struggling with my homework. I very quickly became a constantly sick and irritable monster who had no time for her family or friends.

The next year, I pushed myself even harder. I was taking 6 honors classes and an AP class in a subject that I really did not enjoy. I felt like I was a rope that was very quickly being unraveled into a single thread. The more I pushed myself to do well, the more my grades started to slip, and the more my grades slipped, the harder I pushed myself. It was becoming a vicious cycle and I needed to get out of it.

That was when my mom decided to hire a tutor to help me with the things I wasn't understanding in Algebra. It was the best decision she ever made, because the tutor got me to slow down, take a few deep breaths, and focus on one assignment at a time. When I took her advice and focused on the subjects I had a passion for, I found that I actually enjoyed my science and English class for the first time.

Over the next two years, I took higher level classes in the subjects I really loved, and let myself drop to a lower level in the classes I didn't like as much, or struggled in. I also started taking electives and online courses in sciences because I found that I had a passion for science and that is what I want to study in college. And even though I'm not taking all AP and honors classes, I still got into every college I applied to, even an Ivy League school.