Throughout most of my experience in the public school system, I never really encountered any trouble. I was a straight A student for as long as I could remember and I never really had to try for those A’s. Most things in school just came naturally to me and I never imagined it being any other way.

Junior year of high school saw me drop out of the top 20 in my class. In my school, AP classes weren’t offered till your junior year so I decided to take three of them, namely AP Calc AB, Chem, and Lang. Calc and Chem were widely regarded as the two toughest classes in our school, but I didn’t care. I’d heard that excuse about so many classes throughout my public school career but I always turned out fine. The problem this time though was that I was still expecting the classes to be stroll in the park. Throughout the school year, I constantly struggled in both classes. Although I had external factors that were affecting my ability to perform well in these classes, I still had no real excuse at all and I became extremely demoralized as a result. However, there was a bright light towards the end of this tunnel that I’d managed to get lost in. 

I started studying more for these classes, but I just wasn’t getting them. I’d never had an experience where I just didn’t get something right away in school, and now I was studying but still wasn’t getting it. One day while talking to my older sister, I told her about my struggles in school. One thing she said to me was, “We tend to do well in things that we really want to do.” Those words stuck with me but also confused me. What did that mean? I’ve said that my end goal was to become a chemical engineer since middle school and of course I wanted to get a good grade in those courses, but eventually that made me realize that maybe my end goal wasn’t really whatI wanted. Getting closer to the AP exam dates, I suddenly figured it out. I fully realized that chemical engineering wasn’t what I really wanted to do and I noticed that I truly just had an affinity for pure math. From then on, I wanted to make sure I ended up in a career that heavily relied on math. Having that clarity was a huge relief and took so much stress off my shoulders. It allowed me to finally find a good way of studying for those classes and future classes. Although my grades at the end of that year weren’t the best, I still ended with 4’s on both exams and I was able to carry that momentum with me through the following years, and hopefully for many more to come as I finish school and embark on my career as an actuary.