The Payoff of Perseverance by Sequoia

The Payoff of Perseverance by Sequoia - May 2021 Scholarship Essay

I endured a mentally challenging experience during my semester abroad at my international school in France. I was placed in IB Math Year 1 with no say in the matter, and it turned out I had not had the prerequisites for that class. My peers in that class who had attended private prep schools prior to this international school had previous experience with Precalculus and Statistics yet I had only gone through Algebra 1 and Geometry at that point.
I was determined to do my best and still I fell behind, but not without daily struggle and efforts to succeed. I tried many times to ask for extra help yet ultimately failed this course largely due to what I believe to be a fundamental lack of understanding. I have known education to be composed of mutual respect and support from teachers to students. In this class, students were largely left to fill in the blanks the mathematical information we were not taught during lectures in class, and the teacher and principal were rarely available for support. I used Khan Academy and various other online resources to attempt to teach myself the material the teacher was not teaching us, but it proved to not be enough support to compare to immersive education with a teacher.
This was the first and only time I failed a class, and I was devastated. Upon returning to the US, I took it upon myself to retake that semester of math that I failed through Apex Learning Virtual School while simultaneously enrolled full time at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts. After much effort, I was pleased to end that make-up semester with an A. I am not a student who accepts failure and I am willing to always do whatever it takes to succeed. In this situation, I had simply not had the prerequisites required to succeed, but now, as I apply to college, I am confident that I have now fulfilled all the academic requirements in order to thrive academically in my first year and beyond.