transitions.

wrote this essay for a recent application, thought i'd share. feel free to scroll passed.

I remember attending new student orientation with my own freshman academy. We were invited to attend a discussion on intellectual discipline. Deliberation opened about habits of the mind and I was immediately flooded with the well-developed but only budding knowledge of my peers. I had never before experienced such brilliant answers. Instead of feeling I had nothing to offer, I listened intently.

That was the first of many happenings where I would find myself pleasantly and overwhelmingly surprised by the affinity my colleagues and I shared for knowledge, learning, and personal growth. At the beginning of my first semester, I found it inconceivable that my fellow students and I were all here for very different reasons, yet our reason was one and the same: to learn. It was and is so thrilling to be surrounded by people equally passionate about learning as I am. My first semester was full of fascination, high expectations, and absorption.

As enchanted as I was with the world on college and classrooms, I was confused about what to expect. My classes were very demanding. It was not, however, the demand that scared me. I knew I was capable of meeting those requirements, but I was uncertain whether I was willing. Any possible predictions I could have made about the outcome of my work were hazy. I couldn’t predict the future. This frightened me, and why shouldn’t it have? That is why the transition from high school to college is difficult—because it is scary. It is scary because we don’t know what to expect.

I made it though. The fear never lapsed into total inactivity, but it did occasionally subside. After warming up to professors, study habits, and test formats, I realized I could do the work, and I was willing to do it. And as I slide into the seat of my first semester of college, I am comfortable and my surroundings are familiar. I slide into the seat of self-confident assurance, and I no longer sit in fear. The day I slide into that seat is, of course, the last day of the semester. And I have no choice but to continue into a new path. I must start all over again.

For these reasons, I find I may not ever fully make the transition from high school to college. It seems to me that this transition is what life is all about—trying to hold on to who we were, while working toward the person we want to become. As we chart our way through this course, we won’t know what to expect. As soon as we expect correctly, the unexpected happens, and we are compelled to begin a totally new and unfamiliar, unpredictable course. The transition from high school to this university was my first confirmation that life is a continuous wheel of transition.