Achievement Made: Friends! by Zachary

Achievement Made: Friends! by Zachary - August 2023 Scholarship Essay

Academics have always been somewhat easy to me. It’s a straightforward formula: learn something, memorize it, and then consistently get A’s on every test with little to no studying. Most people I know spend hours studying to be satisfied with a high B or low A on a test. My problems were never about the facts, but about the friends – or lack thereof.

In my freshman year, I sat by myself for 1,260 class periods, not knowing anyone in my classes. That would be understandable for the first couple of days – especially in a year marked by COVID-19 – but I feared talking to anyone whatsoever. Every time I wanted to say something, my body betrayed me. My heart began to race, and my clammy hands scurried to the darkness of my pockets. I was lucky to have a mask that hid the disappointment on my face after I failed to talk to someone yet again. The only thing that really grew freshman year was my fear of talking to others.

The first real signs of progress came in my sophomore year. My group in engineering had been changed once again, and I winced at the thought of having to talk to new people. My group couldn’t have been any more different – a math geek, an athlete, a theatre kid, and an artsy botanist. However, we all had one thing in common: a terrible ability to make friends. And so, we all bonded over that and became great friends. For once, I had managed to make friends that weren’t just pretending to be my friend to get my homework answers. I started to learn that I wasn’t going to make any friends just sitting around and waiting for them to come to me; rather, I needed to look for my friends. I had a history of having terrible friends or just no friends, and that was going to change. After all, beggars can’t be choosers – and I wanted to choose the right friends.

I finally got over the hump in my junior year. On that first day of school, charisma replaced my former fear. Instead of mumbling some basic introduction on the first day of school, I talked with energy and actually wanted people to know me. Turns out, the only things that I was missing were some confidence and a smile. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right – the only thing to fear is fear itself. I made friends in all of my classes – for once, people actually wanted to be friends with me. I had never thought that just presenting myself in a different way and having a different mindset would have an effect as drastic as it did.

You don’t get jobs by waiting for a random person to come up and offer you a job. You don’t get jobs by submitting an online application like every other person does. You don’t get jobs by just having the skills required to work that job. You get jobs by knowing people. You get jobs by being friends with people who can recommend you to their bosses. If you don’t have friends to help you along the way, you’ll have a much more difficult time navigating through life. By learning how to talk to people and make friends, I set myself up for a brighter future. Maybe making friends comes naturally for some, but gaining such a simple ability has proven to be my biggest achievement through my education.