Academic Achievement by Morgan

Academic Achievement by Morgan - March 2014 Scholarship Essay

There I stood, trembling like a Chihuahua with hypothermia, chafed raw by the stiff collar of my ill fitting suit, utterly terrified, and absolutely determined. The microphone was about half a foot lower than my mouth was, so I had to lean down to speak into it, that only made the shaking worse. I must’ve looked like Igor, preparing to flip the switch for doctor Frankenstein. I started speaking, and through the starts and stops, and other stutter noises, I spoke.

This was the two thousand and twelve YMCA Texas youth and government state conference in Austin, and the scale of what I was trying to do dumbfounded me. When I signed up, it was for the Trinity high school debate program; and no one told me what the can of worms I was opening really contained. I expected to throw on a suit and eloquently call someone stupid. I expected to travel to other schools and argue about current events, but what I expected was not what happened at all.

What I did sign up for was a mock congress program where I was privileged enough to be in the elite cadre on delegates whose only credentials were that we were competent. We practiced all year long, crafting laws, arguing both sides of said laws, and we learned proper parliamentary procedure. We learned so much in the five months leading up to this weekend, practice, preparation, practice, contemplation, pep-talks… we though we were ready when we got there, and soon we discovered that we were idiot children around the people who had devoted their lives to this, experience.

We had considered Debate to be a class, at first, then we grew closer knit, and we called it the family, but we truly became a family when we spoke our parts at the state conference. We only had each other, every other team, no, every single person was out for blood, working to see their competition fall. We were unprepared for the backstabbing and manipulating, but we were prepared on the intellectual front.

We had spent all five of those leading months studying, researching, thinking, and preparing for what we thought would be a battle of logic. And while it turned out to be a duel where the only available tools were skullduggery and deceit, our simple and blinding logic peeled away some of the grime. We, I, stood there shaking, stuttering, terrified, but invigorated. No one could contest the facts that I had drudged up from scientific journals and articles, no one could debunk the logic and above board reasoning. It was like searing sunlight burning away mold, a trained scalpel to a tumor, an antigen to a plague.

Not to say that I fixed the program, or ended the corruption, that would require far more light, and more time than anyone has in a single lifetime… but I did do a good thing there, and it was because of a study habit that I developed, one of active and interested learning for its own sake, that helped me. I have used, and will use that habit for the rest of my days, because even the sharpest mind is only as strong as the information it has in it, and by actively seeking knowledge, I make myself that much sharper every day.