My Unexpected Triumph by Temi

My Unexpected Triumph by Temi - March 2014 Scholarship Essay

When we think of the word “academics,” what often comes to mind is the core subjects – math, science, history, or even humanities courses. However, my greatest academic achievement stemmed from an arts class. In my junior year of high school, I learned how to apply the arts to my way of thinking, and my academic career has been remarkably great since then.

In my eleventh grade theatre arts class, I braved what my director called the “perspective monologue.” I was given a monologue from The Miracle Worker, a play written by William Gibson about the life of Helen Keller. As part of the assignment, I was instructed to read, analyze, memorize, and perform the monologue– I did this easily. The next week, however, my director informed the class the every week (for six whole weeks) we would perform the same excerpt again; however, each week, we would be assigned a different emotion to portray in the monologue. Since in my piece, the character was speaking out of anger, I had the daunting task of figuring out how to take the character’s angry words and transform them to come off as happy, sad, and even sarcastic. After six weeks, I performed the same monologue through six different emotions. I scorned the assignment, and every week, I dreaded having to figure out how to change the monologue appropriately; nonetheless, after six weeks of hard work, I realized that I had challenged my creative thinking skills thoroughly, and I was remarkably happy that I completed the assignment.

Although it was intimidating, I learned a great deal from my theatre class – how to think creatively (which now comes naturally to me), the confidence to deliver a message, command a stage, step out of my comfort zone, make mistakes, and most importantly, to try new things without any idea of whether my choices would lead to success or failure. As a self-proclaimed science nerd, theatre did not seem like a likely fit for me, but the lessons I learned through active involvement in theatre arts changed my way of thinking completely – this is something I will forever be proud of.