Everyone has funny stories from when they were learning to drive for the first time, but mine are defined by having to learn it three times. In October of my Sophomore year, I injured my knee a month before turning sixteen, but I was given a knee brace and was told everything would go back into place. When one weekend my dad and I were sitting around being bored, he decided to let me drive him around the neighborhood in our ’99 Volvo s70. I had been practicing before the incident but how I move and when I move my leg to how much pressure I put on the brake and gas pedals all had to be relearned. Doing something as simple as coming to a complete stop at a stop sign meant I would have to rejudge when I would press the brakes because I couldn’t press it all the way down. Some of the time it would be fine, but I also remember my dad anxiously hovering his hand over the e-brake every time another car was near. In November, I had surgery to fix my knee meaning I had to relearn everything again, but I wasn’t nervous because I had already worked through the pain. Even during times when my mom was yelling at me because I didn’t slow down fast enough or was too cautious when accelerating, I still powered through. While it was a stressful obligation throughout the process, by the end of my learning phase, driving became something that I thoroughly enjoyed. After all the yelling and tension ended, learning to drive three times made me realize how quickly life will change and how not giving up when the status quo breaks is a crucial skill if I want to see success.
Whether I did so consciously or not, I began to apply this concept to my life at large, especially in my academic career. Twice during my junior year, I briefly considered dropping two of my AP classes and twice I decided against it. First was during the summer beforehand, when I got an email saying that the AP English class would be one the hardest classes I’d take in high school and that if anyone didn’t think they could handle the difficulty then they should email the teacher and tell him they want to drop the class. Initially I hesitated as English isn’t my forte, and I feared that I was just going to be miserable the entire time. Instead, I decided to stick it out and was rewarded with what was one of my favorite classes in high school, class that helped refine my writing and work with styles other than the formal way I was familiar with. Similarly, my AP Computer Science A class felt very antithetical to how I had learned programming previously, and it didn’t click for me for quite a while. For me, programming has always been something that took time to work through, and if I didn’t know something then I would google it. The skills that I needed for the AP test were the opposite as I had to memorize ways to write certain algorithms and find the quickest way to scribble down the answer. But I chose to power through, and I am now able to use both strategies when I code. Even though neither of those classes were easy, I am still glad I decided to stick with them because of what I was able to learn.
Because of these last two years, I’m not worried about college even though I know it will be tough. If it’s not how I learned it, then I will relearn it and if it’s what I know then I will be set. I’m willing to take the upcoming challenges head on and prepare for what must be done in the next four years and beyond.