A Step Towards Success by Martin

A Step Towards Success by Martin - January 2014 Scholarship Essay

In today's world many people who are involved in some sort of academic or vocational school know that in order for them to do well they must fist learn the subject by spending a large amount of time studying outside of class. However, many of those people who attempt to study in an effective manner usually may end up getting distracted or even bored while studying because their study method lacks focus. Never the less, in time of need people get creative and ambitious when they really want to achieve something that they desire.

For me a class that really challenged my intellectual ability to study in an effective manner was definitely AP United States History. At the beginning of they year I knew that I had to come up with an ingenious way to memorize the names of people, events, and locations that history had been a part of. So I decided that I would of the timeline of history as a story and like I story I decided to divide it up by sections. In this case I divided up history with the different aspects that we had to cover for the AP test. I split up the sections into religion, government,social,war, agricultural, and economical aspects of history in order to accommodate for the large time frame that United States History covers. For each section I decided to make an organizer in which I researched the important people, their actions, the date of their actions and the location in which they did them. Although it seemed intense for me at the start, I had one tool that really helped me clarify each section with descriptive and comprehensible details;I had the History Channel. Even though it seemed like watching videos would distract me it actually enhanced my vision and knowledge for history because they put history on a basis that makes it interesting but at the same time completely educational.

If one thing was certain, it was that watching the videos constantly on the History Channel was allowing for me not to forget the small details that history brings along with it. Although people would think that just by seeing videos would not make me a better essay writer they were shocked when I told them that it did in fact increase my linguistic and literary skills because the people who narrated the videos used a high level of vocabulary. I used the group and video method because they exposed history in away that I could not only understand but in a way that I could recall and restate at any given time. Of course, the process was not easy because there was a large quantity of history that I had to get through in order to prepare myself for the test. I pretty studied using method on a daily basis for about two hours everyday. The key for this method to work has to be patience because a person can not expect to acquire everything in a short period of time because the human brain can only take so much stress and information before it goes into a period of involuntary negligence.

When the test came I knew that I was ready to pass it because the method that I used to study helped me to remember history as a story from beginning being the past to the end being the present. I went into test knowing that I knew the information by heart because of the effort and time that I had placed into getting to know who the crucial and influential people in history were with the help of the videos. Once I received my score some time later I was happy because I had passed with a four on the AP test. I knew that this method had been effective because others who only used a book as a tool to study were not as successful on the test as I was. After this test I embraced many other tests in a similar manner because sometimes just seeing the subject in a book is not an effective way to study but rather really getting to know the subject by heart and being able to recall it at any point by using videos to guide your mind really showed me how this method that I devised changed my study habits in every aspect and subject pertaining to academics.