Stick to Stoic: My Physical Journey by Robert

Stick to Stoic: My Physical Journey by Robert - January 2026 Scholarship Essay

For all of my childhood, I was a skinny kid. My long and bony frame never retained any mass no matter how much I ate. Mind you, I loved eating food. I always ate more than my friends who called me un esqueleto from how skinny I looked. I didn’t want to be this way. It just was impossible for me to gain weight. Or so I thought.

In my freshman year of university, I had the luxury of living on campus. I got access to a gym and an infinite supply of food from the dining hall – perfect conditions for a gym junkie to quickly put on muscle mass. I was no gym junkie, though. I was a perma-skinny type, limited by my ridiculously fast metabolism. Despite a hunch telling me it wouldn’t make me more muscular, I felt pressured to give going to the gym a shot. After all, my dad was paying thousands of dollars for me to have this opportunity while I studied at university.

I decided I was going to at least try to gain strength and muscle mass. I started going to the university gym to lift weights daily. Having to juggle attending lectures, studying, lifting, and eating three meals on a daily basis was quite overwhelming at first. There was always a way to further optimize my schedule and never a clear way to know whether I was doing enough to be successful in the gym and in my studies. I started to overthink, but then I thought, “okay, let’s not overthink this and just do it.”

I went to the gym. Then I went and ate. When I was eating, I was thinking about eating more, and when I was at the gym, I was thinking about lifting more. I was just lifting weights and eating. Life was really simple. When I wasn’t lifting or eating, in fact, I was incentivized to finish studying quicker so I had more time to spend eating after I lifted. I would be in the dining hall for hours; eating, then waiting to eat more food after the feeling of being full subsided.

I didn’t really feel like I was getting better at it at first. I just made it a point to lift until I couldn’t do any more repetitions and eat until I felt like throwing up. It felt like taking a cold shower, it didn’t hurt necessarily, but it felt pretty uncomfortable. The discomfort made me feel like I was doing something right.

When I started going to the gym, I couldn’t bench press 135 pounds a single time. After a few months, I recorded myself bench pressing 155 pounds eight times because my roommate couldn’t believe that I progressed so fast. This was the first time someone complimented me on my strength, which sounded unbelievable to me. I still looked pretty skinny in my opinion, but my parents and some of my friends said I looked kind of swole. They said I wasn’t “meat and bones” anymore. This was awesome.

I reckon it was because of my gym habit that I was doing better academically that year than I did in high school. It felt like things were falling into place in a good way just because I had my mind focused on a positive goal: gaining muscle mass.