So a very positive event in my life happened today after I got back from the gym. I got an email saying i was a recipient of a one thousand dollar scholarship I applied for a while ago. That's a really positive thing and I'm not trying to downplay it at all, becuase I know how beneficial this will be toward paying my tuition and it's a nice confidence booster as well in a sense. I just have this frustration on why I think I won. The scholarship application was fairly simple, I gave them my general information, and then I wrote an essay on the prompt given to me which was basically just a "tell us why you deserve this and why you are student we can believe will do well and be successful". Probably one of the hardest essays to write becuase you don't want to come off so into yourself (especially if you don't really have deep reasons for being in school), but you also don't want to downplay all the great things about you and throughout it you have to make sure you are tailoring the whole thing to the reader. Anyway, with the mind set I was in and the low i was feeling at the time I can honestly say I wrote a terrible essay in the sense of well written literature, and essentially listed the great person i used to be, the depressed person I am today, almost dropping out of school on the first day because of the trauma of the loss of a close friend the week prior, and the frank thought that I just have to keep moving and I shouldn't drop out of college. It was the truth, but it was a sob story plus last years resume. With that mediocre essay, I won.
This time last year I wrote a personal best essay for my college applications about how I planned, executed, and learned A LOT from a volunteer trip to Belize where I worked at an orphanage for a week with the kids, day and night. I've never been so proud of anything in my life. I also applied for several scholarships with that essay. Not only did I not win any scholarships, I also did not get into the schools I wanted too.
The whole thing frustrates me because the sob story won. We should celebrate the positive accomplishments in life. I don't want money given to me out of pity. I didn't do anything to deserve it. A tragic thing happened to me and I wrote a two page essay on it. When you compare it to the months i spent planning and fundraising for my volunteer trip, it's seems like there isn't any set moral guidelines to giving out these scholarships. I hate the idea of being rewarded for the life I'm living right now, because I don't put any effort into it. Being a logical and straight forward thinker, I want reward for accomplishment, not for just participating. Isn't that everyone's problem with millenials anyway? We get a trophy for suiting up and showing up and that some how makes us entitled.
I guess most of all I don't like the idea that striving for success could ever lead me to failure. I don't ever want to live in the mindset that doing something big to affect people will never be rewarded, and i definetly dont mean this monetarily. I just feel like these scholarships promote the negative, and reward the negative. I'm just so tired of the negative.
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