How to WRITE a QUICK and STUPID Scholarship Essay 101

1. Do not plagiarize.
2. Make up a real nice story.
3. Find a quote and run with it.

At the age of 4, through the help of my persistent mother and passionate grandmother I learned to read. At the time, I was not aware of the importance of this event; all I knew is that I could now understand words in their written form. Though I had learned to read at home, when I began kindergarten my teacher used the time-tested methods of understanding letters and sounds before learning about words. The method used at my school was focused around Abrams and Company’s Letter People. The Letter People were thirteen males and thirteen females designed to help beginning learners to recognize the sights and sounds of the English alphabet. I would consider this method one of the most effective because I can definitely at any given moment be found singing one of the catchy Letter People theme songs, especially my favorite, “I’m Mr. Mmmmmm, with a munching mooooouth!!”

The Letter People taught me everything I needed to know about letters and phonetics and I am more than grateful for that influence. However, the most important lesson I learned from the Letter People was a lesson on perseverance. Each of the Letter People suffered from a terrible ailment that was given to them following the rules of alliteration. For example: Mr. C had a colossal cap. Mrs. T had tall teeth. Mr. F had funny feet. Each of these characters had to deal with a physical abnormality as a part of their everyday lives.

Though learning to read at home was a phenomenal occurrence, my childhood was not always filled with such heart-warming experiences. There are two distinct timelines of my life. I had to deal with an unemployed mother who suffered from clinical depression and a father that battled alcoholism. I can recall many days after school wondering who was going to pick me up or if I was going to have to stay alone in after school care. I have lost three grandfathers. I have seen Alzheimer’s take away my great-grandmother and I am watching it overcome my grandmother. I have worked three part-time jobs while being a full time college student and have worked a fulltime job to support myself and help out my three younger brothers. All the while, I have been nothing short of an excellent student for the last 18 years. I have been recognized nationally as an athlete and scholar. I earned academic scholarships to Brown, Marquette and Howard. I have been blessed with the opportunity to meet some of the most influential thinkers of our time such Baba Asa Hilliard III, Dr. Gregory Carr, Cornel West, Toni Morrison, and Michelle Obama. The negative experiences in my life allowed me to be ferociously independent and nurtured a personality dependent on scholarship and academia as a means of escape and serenity from distressful situations. Any teacher or parent would pray that their students would seek the same opportunities for solitude.

As I became a literacy tutor in a classroom similar to one I was in almost twenty years ago, a young girl by the name Malia was quite distressed at how awful the lives of the Letter People are. She said to me, “I would never want to grow up and be in the Letter People! They all have lots of problems!” At first, I laughed at the little girl’s bitter realization; however, I quickly figured that in her mind she was totally right; the Letter People did have a lot of problems. Yet, life’s lessons and the tales associated with each of the letter people have taught me that colossal caps make for excellent hiding places, tall teeth make it easier to chew food and funny feet allow for interesting adventures and curious conversation. Malia’s exclamatory statement gave me the opportunity to share with her how true an old adage really is; when life gives you lemons, it is indeed time to make lemonade. Each of the letter people turned their seemingly difficult handicap into an opportunity for them to share and discover.

So in retrospect, using my impeccably fresh 20/20 hindsight, I reflect upon Condoleezza Rice, the most intriguing black woman in political history, saying, “It is a dangerous thing to ask why someone else has been given more. It is humbling—and indeed healthy—to ask why you have been given so much.” All of my issues and problems have indeed formed and shaped me into the woman I am, but more importantly I must count each one of them as blessings, opportunities to discover and develop, to grow and share, and to live and learn. From this I have ascertained that I can not dwell on the presence or consequence of either timeline alone, for the product of the two, the woman who sits at her desk in Legislative Hall as she writes this, at the juxtaposition of bad and worse, continues to thrive. There is no point in dwelling on the hardships that any one person has dealt with in our lives. I conclude with a quote from one of the greatest examples of perseverance the American culture has to provide to human history, Fredrick Douglass. He once said, “A man is not great because he has not failed. He is great because his failures have not stopped him.”