Wake-Up Call by Olivia

Wake-Up Call by Olivia - August 2014 Scholarship Essay

One of the most important lessons a student inevitably learns is that failures are often as important, if not more important, than successes. This goes for academics, sports, and virtually any other area of life. Failures are designed to make people stronger; once survived, they offer ways to improve next time, and they eventually lead to success. I learned this right of the bat my freshman year of high school.

I am majoring in mathematics at the University of Arizona. I have grown to love and appreciate the subject, and I have nurtured a real passion for learning math. But I was not always that way. My freshman year of high school, I was taking pre-calculus, still a high level of math for a fourteen-year-old, but only because previous teachers and mentors had pushed me to the position in which I found myself. I had a huge ego by that point; I was a straight A student who never studied or worked hard. From the very start of this class, I was convinced that I would have no trouble at all coasting through math that year.

Quickly, I discovered how wrong I was. First a B on a test here or there, a C or two on a rare occasion, then finally the fateful day came when a 59% came back on a particularly difficult test. All I could do was let my own failure stare me in the face as the harsh reality dawned: maybe I’m not a special snowflake. Maybe I have to work hard like—could it be?—an actual high school student.

That was my first major awakening in my academic career. As a naturally wired perfectionist, I quickly raised my pre-calculus grade back to an A. I took the lesson failing had taught me to heart, but I did not let it get me down. Failing, I found, is an alarm in one’s head telling him to make adjustments. If failure is occurring in any form, it is a sign that something in the works of one’s schedule, habits, attitude, or any other of the plethora of factors in life, is off-balance. For me, that was my ego. I felt like I was too smart and too ahead of the game to have to pay close attention in class. I felt like my time after school was too valuable to waste it on studying for a test I already felt confident enough I would pass.

What I learned through this failure was the importance of committing to education and to learning. This would pave my way to becoming a lover of math, a seemingly impossible quality for me to have after my years of indifference in class. Now I am a math tutor to middle school and high school kids, helping bitter students just like I was, and I’m thrilled about my work every day. None of that would be possible without that initial failure.