College Admissions Essay: Competition

Words: 490
Pages: 2

I think that overall competition can be a very positive force in education, inspiring people to try new things and motivating people to try harder. But, unfortunately, I have seen competition turn people into bitter, jealous people. Competition helped me discover one of the many passions in my life. In sixth grade, my social studies teacher had everyone in my class take one of the preliminary exams for the National History Bee. He announced it ahead of time and encouraged people to study, although I did not. He had us take the exam, in which many of the questions I had to guess on. Therefore, I was astounded when my teacher reported that I had the highest score in the entire middle school. The other three qualifiers were all eighth graders. My teacher also had us take the online …show more content…
to remember all the dates and details. My mom really pressed me to do well and I wanted to represent the school well, so I studied a whole bunch more and it paid off with a trip to the National History Bee. Since then, I have been a lot more interested in history and I’ve learned a lot more. I’ve also began to consider pursuing a career in the subject. Without the History Bee competition, I wouldn’t have discovered this at all. When I am running in a race, I always have my best times when I am competing against other people. I believe that this is probably the case for academics as well. People probably are motivated to do more when they have a “bar” to reach for. However, some people don’t handle competition very well in the sense that they can’t stand losing, and it can make them into very unpleasant people. There is one student in particular in my grade, who works very hard, and gets very frustrated when he isn’t the best. During a debate last year where we were both on opposing sides about an issue we felt strongly about. The lead-up to the debate got very heated with lots of trash