Growth

A rising senior's summer can feel like a slow sweet poison. There are many great things about it, like finally being able to drive to your friend's house, but there is always the ominous cloud over each of our heads. From let alone deciding what you want to do in your future, to then trying to put that dream into action the summer before senior year can feel overwhelming. Recently I started to look at the common application and saw the essay prompts they offered. There's a large variety of essay prompts with one of the choices letting you effectively write about whatever you want. I was having a really tough time deciding what to write about, feeling like there were somethings I should say, but nothing I felt passionate to say. This problem plagued me because I wanted to let them know why I was important, not just about who I am. I have not figured out what to say yet, but one thing that has really stuck with me is growth. Growth is the thing I feel that I have done the most. I feel like I have learned so much in my years in high school. I have done things that I never thought I would, and these things did not just happen but took work. Through my time in high school, I have become more involved with clubs and other activities. My freshman year I limited myself severely, not being passionately involved in any specific activity. One thing that really stunted my growth was pure fear of joining new things and having to interact with new people. This petrified me for a long time, but I thankfully did end up getting involved in activities like clubs. Not only that but I made friends with people I would never have expected who have severely influenced me and my life. I truly feel like a new social butterfly who hatched out of my cocoon, The thing that I enjoy so much is that I do not feel like I have lost me in this. I still feel like myself, and I get to experience myself with other people too now, I have learned to love learning. I truly love going into classes feeling passionate, listening and soaking in whatever I can. I have always been passionate about certain subjects, but this love is different from just a passion for a specific class. It is not just a subject but the act of learning itself. I enjoyed so much my experience as a teaching assistant and just being involved in furthering not only my understanding of subjects but finding a way to effectively regurgitate that information to others. Learning really is something I love on both ends of the spectrum, the problem solving, the work, the reward that is felt with each day, all of it is so important. Hard work is something that I could do when it was easy. When something was laid out for me I could solve it, but never before my high school years could I do the work from scratch myself. What truly made me feel like I took a huge step in working without guidance was my Medieval European Research project. We did get a schedule for when things were done, but other than that it was incredibly open-ended with each person being able to choose their own essay topic for it. My topic of the effects of the First Crusade on the Byzantine Empire's economy felt completely hopeless to me for a while. I felt like there was not enough information to figure this out, especially in any statistical way. At this point where I truly did not know what to do, I decided that I would not give up. I found books at the Boston Library that had information that I thought could be useful there. These books could only be looked at in the library and so I could not take them home. This inconvenience did not stop me and I went to the Library after school on a half day and spent a whole afternoon and night reading and finding the information I needed. When home I spent nights scouring the internet to find the most specific and hidden PDFs that might have any useful information for me. I finished my research project and felt genuinely proud of my work. I had become so involved in my work that when I had to turn the paper in I felt sad that it was over. This paper showed myself what I could do, it showed me my potential. Life as a high school student has been filled with ups and downs, but I know that there is a constant I have kept, growth, I have strived to do things I couldn't do before, and while often not succeeding the first time, I have not given up. I have become who I am, and am proud of myself for that.