Making Mechanics Finally Make Sense by Nicholas

Making Mechanics Finally Make Sense by Nicholas - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

Sitting in my high school physics class, I stared at a mechanics exam with a grade so low I had to lie to my peers. Mechanics made sense to everyone else in a way it just didn't for me. Forces, vectors, and torque simply created knots in my head.

I couldn't afford a tutor, so I had to become my own. I started eating lunch in my teacher's room just to ask questions, and stayed after school most days to work through extra problems. I went to office hours constantly, spending hours on the same question until it finally clicked. On weekends, I watched College Board videos on mechanics over and over, pausing to redo every practice problem myself before checking the solution. Trial and error became my method: get it wrong, figure out why, try again. There was no shortcut, just repetition and perseverance.

What that process taught me wasn't just mechanics, it was how to actually think through a problem instead of memorizing a formula and hoping it applied. I learned to break a problem down instead of panicking when a question didn't look like one I'd seen before. That shift, from memorizing answers to understanding the reasoning behind them, is a skill that has stuck with me far beyond that class.

Around that same time, I started researching under professors in cosmology, working on interplanetary trajectory modeling and analyzing black hole coronas. That research relied on the same kind of thinking I had been forcing myself to build in mechanics: taking something complex and messy, and working through it piece by piece until it made sense. I fell in love with that process, and it's part of what pushed me toward mechanical engineering.

When I got to college and took mechanics again, I expected to struggle the way I had in high school. Instead, I found myself breezing through material that once took me hours of office hours and trial and error to grasp. The concepts weren't easier, I was just finally thinking about them the right way. All those afternoons spent redoing problems on my own hadn't just taught me mechanics, they had taught me how to teach myself anything.

That's the part of this experience I value most. Struggling through that class without the resources many of my classmates had forced me to build a kind of resilience and critical thinking I don't think I would have developed otherwise, one that has shaped how I approach every hard problem since.