An Academic Topic That Challenged Me at First by Christopher

An Academic Topic That Challenged Me at First by Christopher - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

An academic topic that challenged me at first was math. In middle school and throughout high school, I generally struggled with math. It was difficult to keep track of what was going on and why it was necessary to learn about certain topics in math, as I never really cared about it since I thought I would never really use it in my life. Therefore, this resulted in me not being motivated to learn more about the subject. Until I went to a community college, I started to grasp more concepts and realized the value of learning math, and also my perspective changed as my Dad mentioned to me that there is no subjective opinion to an answer in math, if you do the problem right, nobody can switch it if they don’t like it. An example of that would be an essay in English class, a teacher can change your grade on the assignment if they didn’t like what you wrote. That helped me look at math differently and motivated me to get better at it. Math has helped me with my critical thinking as I imagine things and how certain numbers and functions would look on graphs, so I got better at visualizing problems in my head without needing to draw them out. It has helped me solve more complex problems, as when I started learning calculus, it looked complicated at first, but by asking questions, finding out what each symbol represents, and what each function does, it cleared up my confusion about what I was learning. So, I approach this mindset to any new topic I am learning, and that has greatly improved my ability to process new information.