Feedback Takes Time by Abigail

Feedback Takes Time by Abigail - August 2026 Scholarship Essay

As you grow up in school, teachers start to give feedback to work you turn in. From leaving small notes on homework to correcting a problem on a math test to leaving comments on online documents. Though sometimes they don't even give you a chance to go back and correct your mistakes. So what is the point of feedback?

I have experienced feedback my whole life. From school, home life, and athletics, but I didn't fully see what it could do until I started swimming in high school. Freshmen year I didn't care much about swimming. To me it was something my mom had forced me to do, and there was so many upperclassmen that were better swimmers than me that I didn't feel the need to get better at the moment, I was content with where I was at.

Sophomore year I realized that there was a little bit more to swimming and wanted to take it a bit more seriously, and so I did, but I still wasn't fully there; I was taking the feedback I saw but wasn't fully seeing it. Junior and senior year went similarly. My coach had wanted me to drop around 2-3 seconds for a state cut, and I had dropped time at our championship meets but never enough to get the cut.

Now, I am swimming in college, and I understand what feedback can do. At our championship meet I had dropped 3 seconds. Going faster than what the state cut for events had been in high school. Feedback can be something small, like a homework correction, and then you learn for the next problem. But feedback is also something that can take time, maybe even years. With swimming, there is no such thing as no feedback; there is always something you can improve to drop time, even if its a hundreth of second. I understand that feedback isn't always going to work the first time. It can take someone telling you a hundred times before you change your habits. But at some point it also on you, you can get feedback for a million people but if you don't make the steps to do better, the feedback won't make a difference.