Hello, I am applying Choate, any suggestions welcome! (on content, structure and grammar... and more)
Your help would be highly appreciated!
The topic: "Write an essay about a personal trait or value with which you identify. Tell us how this trait or value came to be or has been developed over time. "
Just recently, I came across an article describing the differences between perfectionism and excellence. A perfectionist only strives for the outcome and feels anything short of perfect can make them a failure. On the other hand, people who pursue excellence are more focused on the process of fulfilling a goal and learning along the way. These people are very lenient about failure. I was not an absolute perfectionist to begin with, but I did exhibit some of the tendencies towards perfectionism, especially in my early school years. Thanks to efforts made by my teachers, my parents and myself, I started to move toward excellence. I am proud to say that I have made a lot of progress over the years. However, I still have space to improve.
As a young girl, I was very emulous. I always tried to exceed my friends and win at games. At school, I also tried my best to be number one in all my classes. Whenever I scored an imperfect score, I would get a feeling of incompletion and uneasiness. I was more focused on rankings than the learning itself. For instance, my school participated in a district-wide online math competition- Sumdog. I steadily rose up the ranks and had achieved 1st place in my school, and 4th, district-wide, but I still stayed up until midnight some days to pursue 1st place, district-wide. Alas, that never happened. Although everybody at my school treated me almost like a legend, I still had a sense of slight displeasure. In class, most of the time I would not raise my hand to answer a question unless I was 100% sure of my answer. Fear of failure led to lack of class participation on my part. Back then, scores were more important and the learning process was of smaller importance. However, the latter began to grow in importance as I grew up.
Slowly, I began to develop the quality of pursuing excellence. I learned to accept my flaws and focus on gaining the most from experience. However, The path toward excellence was very rocky. Even at 10, I gave up piano after 5 years of hard work due to frustration at the small amount of progress I had made during that period of time and my failure to reach the high targets I had set up for myself. Nonetheless, I picked it up after another year and focused on a realistic goal and increased improvement. Nowadays, I consider piano as something I practice for enjoyment and I have been making substantial progress since I resumed practicing. I developed the trait of excellence over a long period of time with hard work and persistence, even if unconsciously doing so. With help from my parents and teachers, I learned that experience is more important than ranking and mistakes are beneficial in the long run. My teachers encouraged me to be open with my ideas, and my parents became less demanding on scores and told me to focus on improving myself. I began to raise my hand even if I wasn't 100% sure of my answer. I began to set up attainable goals. I began to strive for improvement rather than better scores. I began to become unafraid of failure. As they say, failure is the mother of success"-Chinese proverb.
Currently, I have realistic goals and work hard to achieve them. I enjoy the process of attaining each and every goal and (almost) always get satisfying results. Thanks to my parents who encouraged me, and my teachers who guided me, I am a well-rounded, explorative student. I admit that I definitely have room to improve. From a scale of one to ten, with an absolute perfectionist represented as one, and excellence 10, I have progressed from a three to a six or seven over the past years. In the future, I will be working towards the 10 on the excellence scale no matter what.
While this is a highly developed essay, it lacks one main feature. There is no paragraph that refers the reader to the reasons as to why you finally came to realize that you needed to strive for excellence instead of perfection. What was the catalyst that led to this realization? Why did you feel that it was finally time to make the much needed change in your personality? Does the seed of perfectionism still rear its ugly head once in a while even today? Do you consider that part of your life, when you were striving for perfection to be a negative time? What factors do you think college will offer you that will continue to develop your sense of excellence over perfection? Was there a sense of emotional freedom on your part when you let go of the perfectionist mindset? The Chinese proverb is really misplaced in the middle of the essay the way it is now. Either place it at the beginning as a part of your introductory hook or just delete it. It becomes irrelevant in its current placement and just deviates from the winding down process of the essay.
