Practice Makes Perfect by Panagiotis

Practice Makes Perfect by Panagiotis - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

During the first semester of my senior year my second period class was AP calculus, and I was already behind. I started almost two weeks after everyone else because my family and I travelled out of the country for my cousin's wedding. This meant I had to catch up with the rest of the class in a much shorter amount of time, which was tough. Nothing we were learning really clicked for me, due to me being behind. One day, we learned about how the derivative of a position function becomes velocity and the derivative of that becomes acceleration, and we were shown how to find when a function is increasing or decreasing and when it switches between the to. Now this was a lot to take in, especially because I did not have a full grasp of all the concepts we had learnt so far. It took me quite a while, and multiple videos after school, but I finally got a little understanding of these problems before the test and answered the big Free Response style question on the test correctly. Months later, after the first semester finished, I started my new classes and my first period was AP Physics. The first few days we spent reviewing old concepts that would be useful in the class, but our first real chapter was covering the topics of position, velocity, and acceleration, just like the problems we did in calculus. I realized this, and so did other people in the class that were also in my calculus class, but, because I spent so much time trying to understand and apply these concepts I was able to excel in this unit in my physics class. I ended up with an 101% on this first test we took for unit 1 and I got the highest score in the class. Because of the challenge and struggle I faced earlier in senior year in calculus class, I ended up flourishing later in the year in my physics class.