Undergraduate / A Pi Half Turn (UC prompt 2) 'Fastened tight to the backseat' [4]

Hello! This is a rough first draft. Feel free to be extremely honest! I personally think it needs to be more to the point, less vague..or..just tell me what you think!

Thanks in advance :)

2. Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

Fastened tight to the backseat, I had that feeling all the toddlers sense after they snap Grannie's favorite Chinese teapot. I thought I crossed the line this time. After an-hour-lasting five minutes of silence my father replied normally "She acted as if you have burned down the school..." after a conversation with the class teacher. "You are not stupid, that's what keeps you alive." as he used to say after each hassle I had in school. I might resembled an astute diligent pupil, who has his homework done and his shirt tucked in, but now I know I was just a hyperactive immature kiddo who was nothing else but overwhelmed by himself.

I counted apples put in the basket first, aced at spelling bee, and jumped 4 meters in second grade. When it came to competions I was auger to be part of anything; I wanted to belong to the best in class. I sought for handshakes, certificates and other prizes; no matter if I got a chocolate for knowing the sightseeings of my hometown, or a plenty of sheets saying "the 3rd best runner of the school"-I just wanted material. I looked for recognition presenting a somewhat performance. However, I behaved like a remiss. I fidgeted like an itchy kitty while revising the multiples of 7, refused to tune my voice down on music classes, and devoured my meal when Homo sapiens hunted down his own.

The fact I had good grades in primary school really was a perspective why tutors considered leniently my misbehavior. After 4th grade I entered high-school (spanning 8 years). The onset of my first year at the new alma mater was unsettling though. The competitiveness of my new class did not kneel before my ignorance. I seemed to get lost with everything, had hard time with conjunctions and punctuations and so did with science, and, history. Whenever after the break teachers sat down and started to look for a volunteer to present yesterday's homework I sat still with my eyes glued to the walls and dread the inevitable. Even math became a mystery to me; I couldn't buy adequate paint to dye a swimming pool, nor understand how the teacher counted those 42% achieved on the halfyear math test. I unintentionally joined the trendy group of eleven-year-old students hating math and mocking number-jugglers by calling them nerds. I was deluded. No more negative numbers, please! I wanted my basket of apples back.

In spite of my hatred towards math, I have always enjoyed solving riddles, logic problems, and other puzzles. How a few sentences can imply that the son of the captain is 24 years old, or the neighbor hid the murderer's knife was jawdropping to me. By browsing among the search results, I mostly ended up on math competition websites without even realizing it. Not only did these problems convince me how mesmerizing an idea leading to a solution could be, but also made me to draw connection between everyday life reasoning and math. I started to enjoy solving these problems, the more struggle they required the more rewarding it felt to tackle them.

Meanwhile I bumped into something more than just simple arithmetics or Guess, who I am!, into the typical nasty words like prime numbers and isosceles triangle, the ones I loathed over the first two years of my high school. I had the urge to look up these annoying terms, and understand them. After realizing the deliriousness that took me over, and prevented me from exploring this true beauty for so long, I asserted, I want to speak, embrace, and accompany this pure language.

I ordered tons of mathbooks, browsed for problems, and enervated my parents with my own puzzles. Having a backpack full of scripts and problem sets, I entered the doors of school everyday looking forward to see what diophantine equations will turn the tedious math classes from boredom to splendid moments. As I proceeded in my journey of fascination and obsession, I learned to see things differently; I loved to observe how math ruled the world physics and IT, as we call them in our mortal language. All my personal achievements and accomplishments would have been unattainable without this power. One might say I should be proud of the recognitions like certificates or honorable mentions I gained in the upcoming years of high-school; however the thing I'm most proud of were my decisions and insistness to pursue something, that would have been unattainable without the early recognition of my ignorance and blindness, that always did and always will put me to test.