We See Color by Trishia

We See Color by Trishia - July 2019 Scholarship Essay

Every day, we fall into a monotonous routine. Millions of students race to beat the rising sun, running out of the door as faded rays peek through stagnant gray clouds. We’re herded into big gates with the same dull toned buildings, miniature prisons where our voices are limited and our ears are bombarded by hundreds of facts–too many facts.
Unfortunately, lots of students adapt this apathetic attitude towards an institution meant to spark a fire in the youth’s uninterested eyes. To put it simply, many students harbor little interest to learn because they have yet to find a topic that catches their attention. They lack what we call a passion for knowledge, and the consequence is a generation of bright minds sitting in wooden desks and counting down the minutes before dismissal.
Like the typical student I described above, I was a victim to mechanical routine. Going to school was basic procedure, getting good grades a basic necessity. As a student who focused on the letters and numbers that supposedly defined my intelligence, I was metaphorically “seeing gray.” Teachers would introduce us to new content every day, but nothing sparked my interest. I was recognized for my academic excellence, but my school life remained monochromatic at best; I felt suffocated by this tiresome pattern: waking up early, reading, writing and taking quizzes endlessly, doing homework efficiently, going to sleep early, all for school. For the longest time, that lack of passion was all I saw and all I knew. It wasn’t until I experienced my first “failure” in my 9th grade Honors English class that I finally began understanding what it meant to be passionate about school, and it wasn’t until two years later in my AP Chemistry class that I really understood the feeling of wanting to learn more.
Going into high school, I was apprehensive about maintaining my grades with the same amount of effort I put into my education during elementary and middle school because my English teacher specifically warned our class that earning an A would only come from hard work and a strong desire to improve our writing. As it turned out, my fears were confirmed. After 9 years of schooling, I earned my first B. My self confidence reached a devastatingly low pit, but my failure taught me an important lesson about harboring a passion for education. I began defining “passion” as having a genuine interest in a subject; passion is learning not for the sake of the grade, but for the sake of enhancing your skills. For the rest of the year, I attempted realigning my goals, conditioning myself to practice writing and analyzing passages so I could become an effective communicator. When summer rolled around, I left the first class I received a B in with a flashy grin on my face; I had not only earned the grades that I wanted, but, more importantly, I came away with refined writing abilities and a genuine interest in English. Still, a tangible definition of “passion” wouldn’t dawn on me until I was a Junior in high school.
When I first enrolled in AP Chemistry, previous students who, like me, were high achievers and “grade-grubbers,” discouraged me from taking the course. Their comments about the class’s difficulty eventually weighed down on me, and I came into Chemistry thinking that it would be a repeat of Honors English 9, that I was not intelligent or passionate enough about learning to succeed (which was further confirmed when I received a D- on my first Chemistry exam). Strangely enough, despite my scores, I found myself curious about the content that my Chemistry teacher taught. I chalked my failure up to not learning as much as I could rather than not having the basic capacity to learn, and my passion for AP Chemistry blossomed from the nights I spent reviewing content, watching chemistry-related videos, and talking to my dedicated Chemistry teacher. AP Chemistry taught me that having a passion for education means refusing to limit yourself to learning a few things, and striving to expand your knowledge. Often times, students dismiss school as a boring requirement to graduate and eventually find a job, but education means so much more than career exploration. When we learn about our history or our biology, for example, we give back to the world. To me, harboring a passion for education means waking up every day and thinking, “How can I be smarter than I was a day ago?” Having a passion for education doesn’t mean you’ll never be bored during a lecture or that you’ll never struggle to grasp certain concepts. In fact, passion, in my opinion, materializes during those frustrating moments where we want to give up or tune our teachers out. But we don’t. Having a passion for education means impacting lives with our intelligence, utilizing a tool that will make us better human beings.
I used to see gray every day. I didn’t care what my teachers taught me as long as I could pass a course and maintain a high GPA. Now, I want to impact the world as Chemistry major whose ultimate goal is to instill a fire for education in everybody I meet. Harboring a passion for education is harboring a passion for advancement, and that is how we will change the world.