Challenges of academic rigor by Josh

Challenges of academic rigor by Josh - May 2026 Scholarship Essay

My name is Joshua Allen, and I am entering my second year at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte as a pre-exercise science major. My first year in college was eventful, and it changed my perspective on life after leaving home.
During my high school years, my classes usually came fairly easily to me, and I didn’t do much studying. I focused solely on school-related activities during my class periods and maintained a 4.1 GPA. Towards the end of my time in high school, I had started to wonder if my courses were “too easy” and would cause me to carry bad habits into college. I was aware college was going to be different from high school, but I still did not know what to expect.
Over the summer, I started preparing for the courses I had for the fall semester, so I had a pretty basic understanding of all my subjects before entering classes. This allowed me to do well in the first few weeks of classes. As we got deeper into the semester, more complex material started to give me more issues. During this time, I also realized how a professor's teaching style can impact learning. At that time, I did not understand my math professor very well and had to use online sources to help me understand the topics better.
I learned quickly that mastery of topics is usually due to extra time looking into them instead of only seeing the material during instructional time. Working on the topics independently helped me apply my own knowledge to what the professor was teaching and created a better understanding in that class. Implementing these practices worked well, as I did well in math and all of my other classes that semester.
I started again in the spring semester with more difficult courses, like anatomy and chemistry. In these classes, I practiced the same things, just at a higher magnitude. Chemistry has definitely been the most difficult course I've had since entering college. One small mistake will ruin your answer. I didn’t start out as well as I did in math, getting a 60 percent on my first exam.
After that, I started studying an hour of chemistry every day, mostly watching YouTube videos that demonstrated the problems we were doing. I was slower to catch on to it than other subjects, but improvements started to show eventually. I improved a letter grade on each exam after the first exam, up until the final exam.
My first year of college required a lot of hard work and focus to be successful, and I'm hoping that I can keep these habits as I go into harder courses.