A Piece of Advice by Sierra

A Piece of Advice by Sierra - March 2019 Scholarship Essay

If I had the chance to offer one piece of advice to incoming freshmen at ORCA, it would be this: Enough is never enough. It is not enough to do the least amount of work, it is not enough to be ‘acceptable.’ In order to succeed, you must go above and beyond what is asked of you. I learned this lesson the hard way when I entered ORCA as a junior. I was challenged in ways that I did not expect, as indeed incoming students will be challenged in new ways. So I offer my small piece of advice, encouraging students to be prepared to go beyond the letter of the law and research engage with the material presented to them.

I strongly encourage students to explore further into their schoolwork, to dig deeper for every scrap of information there is to glean from the material, because ORCA teachers ask you to think differently from other teachers. When I entered ORCA, I thought my experience would be just like any other high school. However, I quickly learned that half-baked answers would not be acceptable. It was only when I started to engage with the material in a meaningful way that I began to see more depth in the simple facts I was told to memorize. There is always more to explore, and if I hadn’t put in the extra work I would never have seen much of what there was to see.

ORCA challenges its students in ways that public high schools never could. Students are asked to think deeply about every aspect of the material, and to have a passion for digging deeply for new information. ORCA seniors read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, and are expected to understand the story both on the surface as well as the overarching themes and moral implications. A recent assignment was to compare M. Frankenstein and the monster to modern geneticists and the direction that eugenics may take in the future. These assignments require an extreme amount of critical thinking and a drive to delve into difficult concepts. They pose new challenges to students in ways that cannot be done in a classroom.

For ORCA students, it is never enough to do the minimum. Not only does doing as little work as possible result in a poor grade on the assignment, but it impedes a student’s learning in future lessons. I learned to delve into the lesson material to find what I needed, an important skill moving forward into college. It is challenging to do so, but that is the whole point. If it wasn’t challenging, students wouldn’t learn what they needed to. Students at ORCA need to be open to learning, and the first step towards that goal is to do more than what you think you need to.