"Doing to Learn" by Russell

"Doing to Learn" by Russell - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

There are many academic topics that challenged me in high school. All the challenges that I faced from these academic topics helped me strengthen my critical thinking skills. There is one topic that stands out from the rest; this topic was AGR199, which is Contemporary Issues in Agriculture. Let's first imagine ourselves as a junior in high school. Not many juniors take online/virtual college classes in my high school. Most take in-person college classes first. I was able to take Contemporary issues in Agriculture online and was happy to find that I needed little help with the content. What challenged me the most was writing papers that were larger than any other papers that I have written in the past. I also found citing my work even more difficult. I reached out to a past teacher to help me with writing in APA instead of MLA format. That teacher told me that they did not know how to help me because they only taught MLA and were out of date with APA. Because of this, the course really challenged me and helped me to gain critical thinking skills along the way. These included challenges with intense writing assignments, long study sessions and taking many notes.

First, how did the intense writing assignment ultimately strengthen my critical thinking skills? I want to first go over how intense these writing assignments were. There were four papers that had to be over 1,000 words. For a high school junior that is a lot of writing considering this must be included in with their regular classes. I remember spending weeks writing the assignments. I would have to gather a lot of research, which often took several days. Then I would begin to outline the paper itself and begin writing the content, which often took about a week. So, for a high school junior that was taking other advanced courses in addition to this class put a lot of strain on me. In the end, I gained critical thinking skills learning how to manage my time. This is because I would have to learn how to do research and think about writing the paper along the way. By using my syllabus, I was able to plan for these papers which helped me manage the course load in the long run.

Next, how did the long study sessions build critical thinking skills? These study sessions were long, taking anywhere from one to three hours at a time. I would often have to toggle back to my notes and look at the major points being presented. There would be anywhere from 30-60 major points for each topic. I had to come up with a strategy, which included taking breaks to help reset my mind. Then I would see what I remembered and reviewed my notes. This helped me to build a note taking strategy and be able to develop my note taking abilities. In the end, I gained critical thinking skills by being able to take better notes and how to organize my thoughts.

Finally, how did taking many notes help me with my critical thinking skills? It helped me by making me learn how to condense my longer notes into more specific topics. This has been useful for all my classes and will be useful for when I am in college full-time. In my college classes, I often would have 60-120 pages of notes that I would have to write. This would take anywhere from three to five hours. I would spend a lot of time writing these notes and often became overwhelmed. I overcame this by shortening the number of words I wrote in the notes and only wrote the highlights. This helped improve my critical thinking because I had to pick out important information from a larger number of words. I was able to condense my notes from 60-120 notes to 40-90 notes. This is how taking notes in my college classes helped me with my critical thinking skills.

In all, there were many academic topics that challenged me. AGR199 Contemporary Issues in Agriculture helped me build critical thinking skills through intense writing assignments, long study sessions and taking many notes. I have learned that managing my time, taking breaks and taking quality notes will be skills that I use for the rest of my life.