<p>This is an early draft of my common app essay, which I know is flawed. Anyways, I'm looking to apply to UVA, William & Mary, Washington & Lee, and University of Richmond, and any help would be gradually appreciated. The prompt that this is addressing is a story or background that you feel your application would be incomplete without.</p>
<pre><code>Why do teenagers today seem to lack motivation? Today, I read two Tweets dealing with the general apathy of teenagers. “The amount of explicitives given is equal to the amount of honest politicians in Congress” one Tweet said, “not even a motivational speech can get me through the school year” another said. Teenagers nowadays lack energy and drive, because they don’t take the time to see what motivates them. My source of energy and motivation can be best described by the Michaelangelo quotation, “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark”. Through the story of my middle school career, I have determined that the key to my success is my desire to overachieve and set my goals high.
Like most teenagers, I was quite lazy at times throughout middle school. The only thing that motivated me at all was the fear of my mother yelling at me. “If you don’t improve your grades, I can take away all of your electronics and make your life miserable” I remember my mom angrily shouting at me. Since I hated being yelled at, I set my goal to avoid my mom yelling at me. In order to achieve this goal, I did the bare minimum; study when mom told me to and earn all A’s except for a B+ in math. I did just that for a year and a half, and pleased my mom so much that she told me that she would stop yelling at me and getting on my case. Since I had set my aim too low and achieved a goal that I easily achieved, I lost my motivation and willpower. Since my drive is the engine behind my academic success, my grades began to slide downhill, until I reached a low point. I received the grade of a D- on a quiz, and I remembered staring at the piece of paper, devastated, and praying that the D- was actually an A-.
In many ways, this failure was a new beginning for me. I realized that my old way of relying on my mom to motivate me and giving myself easily achievable goals was not working. I Googled quotes about success, and came across the Michaelangelo quote in the introduction. I thought about how I could apply this quote to my life, and I thought a good goal would be to earn the honor of valedictorian of my middle school class. Since I was so adamant about achieving this goal, I studied day and night, convinced my mother to hire a tutor, and met with my teachers to review concepts that I probably had a good grasp of, just to make sure I knew them. Because of my newfound motivation, my grades began to skyrocket. From that point on, I achieved straight A’s throughout middle school, and graduated with a 97 average. I was devastated however, when I discovered that I didn’t achieve my goal of becoming valedictorian. I was literally a fraction of a percent away from earning the title, but I achieved the honor of salutatorian. I realized that I had a lot to be proud of, because I was able to find my own way to achieve success and I achieved what was practically unthinkable a year before.
I carried on this philosophy of setting my goals just out of my reach throughout my career in public high school and met similar results. I have been able to hold a position in the top 4% of my class and obtain decent SAT scores due to the motivation from my extremely high aims. Through my middle school career, I have learned that my success depends so deeply on my motivation, a result of my goals.
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