The Power of Pride by Thomas

The Power of Pride by Thomas - March 2014 Scholarship Essay

In high school, I was part of the fifty percent that made the upper fifty percent possible. I never worried about graduating, but I am glad we didn’t march in order of overall grade point average. If I had been asked about academic achievements before college, I would have said “passing Chemistry by hardly going one whole class without sleeping,” but that is not an achievement. College was a change of pace for me and I had a new set of goals—in large part, I wanted to experience academic achievement, so I set a high goal to graduate cum laude and to maintain that status every semester through college. It was a goal that was easy to check in on regularly—while it was a four-year goal, I had a definitive check-in every semester.

Imagine the difficulty from graduating high school with about 2.6 grade point average, refusing to do homework I did not agree with, and falling asleep in class for sport only to attend college with a goal of maintaining a minimum of a 3.5 grade point average per semester and over the course of the four years. I had to learn new concepts: studying even when I think I understand the content, doing homework even if I believe it is busy work, and staying alert in class because class participation is a major portion of the grade. It was not an easy transition. I did not always get the grades I thought I deserved, which opened my mind to a new viewpoint. In high school, if I received a poor grade, I thought I deserved it because I slacked off. If I received a good grade, I thought nothing of it. In college, if I received a poor grade, I thought I deserved better because I worked hard. If I received a good grade, I felt proud because I knew how much I worked for that grade. It was the first time I felt proud or upset over the grades I received. Pride is more powerful than anyone has ever suggested. Having never felt pride in my work before, I would not have believe the effect it had on me. Until I felt it, I did not know that pride pushes me to work even harder. If I was proud of a B+ on one test, I wanted to make myself prouder and receive an A on the next.

By the end of the first semester I found a letter in my mailbox. I was invited to attend the Dean’s List Banquet. Since I had made a career in high school as an underachiever, or an achiever at best, I did not even know what the Dean’s List was. Nowhere in the letter did it explain it was due to academic excellence. I asked my resident assistant and he explained that it is a banquet held each year by the Alpha Lambda Delta organization on campus recognizing students who maintained a 3.5 grade point average or higher in their first year and are in the top twenty percent of their class. I was quite ecstatic. I attended the banquet and received a letter of academic achievement from the president of the organization and received praise from the members and other students who were attending the banquet. I mark that moment as one of my greatest academic achievements. The pride I felt then helped to push me to excel in the following years until I marched on graduation day and the president announced “Cum Laude.”
I now plan to attend a Master’s program with similar academic goals. The ability to graduate with praise has helped with my confidence and pushed me to apply to a top university in my program. As an accepted student, I look to begin attending in the fall.