A New Found Dedication by Kayleen

A New Found Dedication by Kayleen - January 2026 Scholarship Essay

Many people assume students' motivation in their educational careers halts during the last few years of school due to uncertain futures looming overhead, with the only comfort being able to look forward to holding that degree while sighing in relief. This was not the case for me; I began school with minimal motivation. My academics suffered immediately, but I could not quite care. I disliked going to school, dreamed about returning home every day, and hardly paid attention to my dropping grades. In elementary school, I was a good student; my teachers would sing my praises, behavioral-wise and academically. I never exerted myself by studying, as I felt it was all common sense to me.
When I moved districts in middle school, my difficulties began. My elementary school was a bilingual school where my math and science courses were taught to me in Spanish. When I moved to a different district, I was completely lost. I was not even fluent in Spanish, so it should not have been such an adjustment, but I had still been taught in that language and could not quite translate all the lessons back into English. Even though math should have been the same since numbers do not change from either of those languages, I was still young to where tricks and methods usually accompanied math lessons to help our young minds digest the math problems. Those methods were foreign to me in this all-English school; I had learned different ones in Spanish that made no sense to me in English. It was an adjustment that I could not quite keep up with. I barely went to middle school as well. I had transitioned halfway through into an online school because of the pandemic. Therefore, when I began high school, studying was not even an option that I considered, I was used to accepting my failing grades and being passed simply because of all the chaos in the world at that time.
I suffered from declining grades all the way until my junior year. I suffered out of my own choosing and ignorance. By my junior year, my GPA was below a 3.0. At that point, I was beginning to look into scholarships; they seemed simple enough. I loved writing, so I knew these scholarships were worth looking into. There was a problem that began to surface: I was ineligible for many scholarships because of my decreasing GPA. I felt I had dug myself into a terrible situation of my own making and had no way out. I continued my junior year without much care, already accepting my situation, until I began my English class at the beginning of my junior year. This English class was an accelerated course. I did the bare minimum, and when the halfway reports rolled around, I was at an A, which delighted me. I had never gotten such a good grade on a major class before. I intended to keep my grade, but the class proved to be far too difficult to rely on my so-called ‘common sense’ skills. I knew it would take some sort of dedication. I worked diligently on my English papers after school, and I took the liberty of purchasing all the books I would need to read in class and write papers on. I learned I could produce well-written papers when I annotated and highlighted key information. When the final grades were released for that class, I had ended with an A. The school had dropped the A+ scoring in that year, so I had truly achieved the highest grade in that class. I was overly proud of myself. It became apparent that my dedication granted me desirable results. Dedication was a strength that I began to grow. By the next trimester, I had received more A’s and nothing less than a C, whereas before, my grades always stayed between B’s and C’s, and always had one grade dip to a D. I desperately wanted to see my GPA go up. I would often look at other students with amusement, those who cared far too much about their grades; I began to adopt that very mindset.
By my senior year, I was obsessed with obtaining good grades. I managed it, ending that trimester with all A’s. I applied the dedication I gained to other areas of my life. Because I began the hunt for scholarships primarily in my senior year, there are times I would identify with a scholarship greatly, as I knew I could produce something I would be proud to submit, but there have been a few times when I would find these scholarships the very day they were due. I have not let that stop me. I have developed a system to get last-minute things done while still maintaining a high production value in these projects.