The Value of the Details by Sebastian

The Value of the Details by Sebastian - June 2019 Scholarship Essay

My sophomore year chemistry teacher, Mrs. Martin, was boisterous, extreme, and excessive. She would arrive late to class, take naps on the desks next to the window, and read the class jokes while we took her tests. She was also perhaps the smartest and quickest thinking teacher I have ever had. She never failed to immediately answer a question in great detail following a sarcastic and witty response which was inevitably very funny. However, I did not know any of this on our first day, nor the day we took our first quiz.
The first unit we covered that year was nomenclature and significant figures, both of which had a set of rules you simply needed to follow and your answer was spit out. Considering the only side of Mrs. Martin I had seen so far was her extravagant presence in the classroom, I had no doubt our first quiz on these two topics would be utterly straightforward and easy. I spent the night before that first quiz watching Netflix and Snapchatting my friends--not even entertaining the thought of reviewing my notes or opening my textbook for practice problems. When class rolled around the next afternoon, I breezed through the set of nomenclature questions followed by a handful on significant figures and confidently handed in my quiz first out of the whole class. I then cruised down to the library and spent the rest of the period bragging to my friends about how easy my chemistry class was.
Later that week when Mrs. Martin handed back our quizzes I found out in complete shock and embarrassment I had gotten nearly every significant figure question wrong. Not only that, but I had received the single lowest grade on any high school assignment thus far. At 3:15pm that afternoon when the bell rang, I hurried to her office and asked her to help me understand how I had gotten what I thought had been such simple questions wrong.
“Look at this one for example,” she pointed out, “the question asks, If I have 5.60mL of a liquid and I pour out 0.6mL of the liquid, how much do I have left? Now Sebastian, any student or faculty member in this school can subtract 0.6 from 5.60 and come up with the correct answer, but the lesson here is how you present your answer, have you followed the rules of significant figures and presented it in the correct form?” I quickly checked over my answer of 5.00mL and realized I had indeed the wrong number of significant figures. Mrs. Martin and I continued to go through my quiz question by question and it was the same mistake each time: I had simply blown through the problems as fast as possible not considering the instructions or the lesson this quiz was intentionally designed to test.
Before I left her office that afternoon Mrs. Martin reminded me it’s not the obvious or clear things in school that matter, it’s the details, the extra work or the care taken in your essays, lab reports, art portfolios or performances. She taught me that it does not matter how great an essay topic of yours is, if you cannot eloquently argue with rich detail and persuasive language your thesis. Nor does it matter how vibrant and textured a photograph of yours appears if you fail to properly measure and cut a matte cleanly without ragged edges or uneven borders with which to hang your work.
Mrs. Martin showed me first hand the importance of slowing down and taking care in your work the first time you do it to ensure quality. I have worked to apply this mentality through each major project or small in-class assignment I am given. I also have found encouraging others to do the same gives me a feeling of pride-- perhaps I motivated someone to test themselves and put forth their best work instead of the sloppy version they’re used to. This may have been the single largest and most impactful lesson I remember from that sophomore year chemistry class, although I will never forget the day I returned the the library after I had got my quiz back and embarrassedly admitted to my friends that perhaps the chemistry class was not as easy as I had first thought.