AP for me! by Lillian

AP for me! by Lillian - December 2024 Scholarship Essay

My most challenging academic experience has been when I took my first AP class. I took AP World History my sophomore year of high school and I was not ready for the amount of rigor that was involved in this class. For me, the main difference was the massive amount of material that we had to cover in just a short period of time. The school I attend is a “University Model” school where I attend school in person with a teacher three days a week and the other two days are spent at home in a homeschool format. As a high schooler, the homeschooling portion is no longer your mom teaching you but rather much like a college where you have to teach yourself from the stuff that the teacher sends home.
There was just so much more material and work to do for this course. Some might call it “busy work” but it was all beneficial for us to learn the material. Unlike the other regular classes that I took up to that point, I had to intentionally spend time studying and working on homework well into the evening hours to make sure that I was prepared for the tests.
Another major difference was the amount of time and effort that I had to study for the final exam and AP Test. In most of my other regular classes, I really never had to study for the final exam since I had already learned all the material. Plus, most of the final exams were very surface level covering very little depth of the concepts. However with this AP class, the questions were very in-depth and we had to apply all the concepts that we had learned. My hard work paid off. I finished the class with an A and earned a 5 on the AP Exam. The bigger win for me in this is that I learned the value of hard work.