Advice to my Past Self by Marley

Advice to my Past Self by Marley - July 2025 Scholarship Essay

If I could go back in time and give my 11th grade self some advice, I would have told myself to take pre-calculus instead of AP Statistics during my senior year of high school. I decided to take AP Statistics my senior year because I was told it was much easier than taking pre-calc. That turned out to not be true at all, and I actually struggled in AP Statistics more than any other class I had taken up to that point. After I got through that class, it was time for me to pick classes for my first semester at Davidson College. I came into college thinking that I wanted to major in economics. I had gathered from talking to one of my teammates that calculus was required to major in economics, so I decided to take Calculus 1 for my first semester. After the first week of that class, I realized I had no clue what I was doing and that I didn't belong in the class due to my lack of prior knowledge. Calculus was a very stressful class for me; I would attend all my professor's office hours, I had help from a tutor, I watched countless videos, but it wasn't enough. I could not catch up to the rest of my classmates who had taken pre-calc or calculus in high school. I finished with a 63 in Calculus after a stressful semester with lots of hard work, and it is the worst grade I had ever gotten in a class. Had I took the time to consider taking pre-calc in high school instead of AP Statistics, I would have definitely been more prepaed for Calculus during my first semester at Davidson and I would not have finished with such a low grade.