How Technology Rewired My Brain by Jahsean

How Technology Rewired My Brain by Jahsean - November 2025 Scholarship Essay

A spreadsheet used to mean columns and rows. Then it became my classroom.

When my mom was 103 degrees and my economics final was in four hours, this was not an essay I had to write. It was a real-time deliberation of a response system. I created a whiteboard-to-virtual medication administration schedule, doctors to text or call, and timed breaks from studying. I applied what would become my first information system without knowing. But more interesting to me is that this circumstance exposed something new about how I should learn.

That's when technology becomes a partner of thought and not just a tool.

Students learn from textbooks and lectures. I learned that the best classroom could be one where, when your concrete world demands the synthesis of systems thinking with a management of resources and academic studies, intervention is necessary and organized chaos is the only route to success. When crisis limited my synthesized orchestration of chaos, I learned that technology could fill the blanks between chaos and calm. Then I became obsessed with that possibility.

That's what Varsity Tutors, like many concepts that make up your vision, understands. There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all learning experience. Often, the most transformational moments happen when a student receives personalized intervention at the exact moment it's most needed. The system I created at 2 AM became my blueprint for the rest of my life. Color-coded apps. Automatically scheduled alerts and reminders for projects long before they were due. Time-blocked efforts based on my optimal cognition hours. Systems that build upon thought without taking thought out of the equation.

When you're balancing five APs, six honors courses, three IB ones, and twelve concurrent enrollment college offerings, there's no sustainability without acknowledging that technology allows me to customize the cadences of necessary learning per preferred rhythm. I'm not just operating with these systems; I'm thinking through them. When my AP Statistics assignment coincidentally overlapped with my college-level analytics course project, technology bridged the gap between underlying connections I'd otherwise never have made. Suddenly, learning was no longer siloed; it was integrated.

That's what gets me excited about technology: it's changing how we think. We're not slow/lazy thanks to smartphones and dashboards; we recognize patterns quicker than ever. We see systems within systems within systems and tackle multilayered questions instead of linear ones.

And there's humor, too. Like that one time I spent forty-five minutes color-coding a spreadsheet only to realize I had coded it wrong and had to do it all over again. Did that make sense? No. Did I laugh at myself for being that level of systems crazy? Yes.

But that's the truth of it. Technology taught me how to become obsessive, compulsive about clarity, taking the friction out of a task because there's no friction between the understanding that has to happen and the outcome of understanding it. It taught me resilience when systems fail (and they will). It taught me that ingenuity comes from personal need and never theoretical desire.

Varsity Tutors embodies this best because your platform recognizes that learning is not universal for everyone; instead, pathways to success emerge with the understanding that technology and people go hand-in-hand, the tool supports the process of thought, but never the reverse.

This scholarship means that acknowledgment exists for students like me, those who embrace technology as not a distraction, but as a transparent lens through which we learn how best to foster a sense of cognitive action. It means education is better suited when it's individualistic, pace specific to strengths assumed. It assumes that the students who will create systems of tomorrow are the students who have access to resources that match their ambitions.

That's what technology has done for my classroom experience: it hasn't made me a better student, just a different type of thinker. And that's the award-winning scholar you've been looking for!