My High School Struggle by Abbey

My High School Struggle by Abbey - December 2024 Scholarship Essay

Throughout high school, I have faced many common academic challenges such as procrastination, getting a bad grade, time management, and many other reoccurring things. Although I have never experienced an over-the-top academic challenge, one seems to continue to weigh me down and continually cause me to struggle, and that is procrastination. Procrastination is a challenge that I have tried to overcome multiple times in my life, whether that being getting help from my friends and parents, or just trying to self-discipline myself. Fortunately, the amount of procrastination in my life has been on a slow decline, allowing me to rely less and less on this burden every day.
Whenever I am assigned something like a research paper, or something more simple like math homework, I always catch myself looking at the due date, and doing everything, or mostly everything on the day that it is due, rather than working on it ahead of time and prioritizing my academics. For example, just at the beginning of this school year, I was assigned a 6-page research paper, and we were given 2 weeks to complete this essay, in my head, I thought that I had all the time in the world when in reality two weeks really is not that much time to complete what I wanted to complete with this paper. Instead of creating an outline and gathering research for my paper throughout the two weeks, I jumped straight into my essay without a second thought and I only finished typing my introduction by the end of the first week. I thought that that was good enough and then I could just use the extra time next week to get it done, instead of just working on all of my essay the first week, and revising it the second week. When the second week rolled around, I realized that I needed to really get started on this essay or it wouldn’t get done, so I was typing away throughout the second week, barely giving myself enough time to look over my research paper and make much-needed revisions and corrections. I remember being very stressed out about this paper, which caused it to be the pivotal point in my academic work, regarding procrastination. It was then that I told myself that I needed to stop prioritizing other things and put my academics first or I was not going to thrive in college.
I am so overjoyed that I was able to make this change mentally because it has saved me from a lot of unneeded stress throughout these past few months. All it took was the realization that this wasn’t going to work in college, so I buckled down and started doing my work ahead of time, so I could save myself from the unnecessary stress that can be avoided. There were people in my life who also helped push me towards success, those being my parents, friends, and even some teachers. I greatly appreciate everyone willing to help me make sure that I am doing my work on time because it is very important to me that I don’t turn in anything late, or pile extra stress on my shoulders. I’m sure that many other academic challenges lie ahead of me, but I am confident that I can overcome them with the help of myself, and the support of my friends, family, and teachers.