Extracurriculars by Kavya

Extracurriculars by Kavya - September 2025 Scholarship Essay

When I was nine, visiting the Smoky Mountains, I saw an artist quietly painting. He noticed me and said, “Don’t be an artist. It’s not worth it.” His words stuck with me—not as a warning, but as a question: why wasn’t it worth it?
Years later, I began to understand his frustration. In school, creativity is often treated like decoration. It’s literally in the name: extracurricular. The extras come after the “real” work—after the math homework, after the tests, after the race for GPA and class rank. Stress and competition weigh so heavily on students that sometimes you can hear it in the silence of the classroom: pencils scratching, everyone bracing for the next grade.
But through leading Artists for Impact—a student-run club with galleries that raise money for local creative organizations, I’ve also seen what happens when creativity is given space.
The events themselves were small, with borrowed materials and wrinkled posters— but something bigger was happening. A shy student sold her first painting and glowed with pride. Friends who rarely spoke in class cheered each other on at karaoke. For a few hours, no one worried about résumés or test scores. We were just kids, discovering that our creativity wasn’t extra at all—it was essential.
That is the change I hope to see in education over the next ten years: for creativity to move from the margins to the center. Creative projects teach leadership, problem-solving, and resilience—but they also give something less measurable and more urgent. They give relief. They remind students that school can be more than a competition; it can be a community. They let students risk, fail, and try again without the weight of a grade.
If schools made space for creativity, students would graduate with more than knowledge. They would graduate with confidence, belonging, and stronger mental health. They would leave not just prepared for tests, but prepared for life.
I still think about the artist in the Smokies. Maybe he believed art wasn’t worth it because the world around him said so. Ten years from now, I hope no student hears “it’s not worth it.” Instead, I hope schools make creativity the key to making learning worth it for everyone.