Undergraduate / "KEEP WORKING" - Central to identity [4]

Is it too late?I really need someone to do the final refinement of my essay. It is only 5 days now!!

1.Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story

1%'s weight
Hard work is no sure path to success.
From my childhood my teachers told me to keep striving for a goal. ＂Keep working," they said, "The success will come upon you eventually." However, my experience in lab told me a different story.

Armed with the belief that perspiration makes everything, I entered the carbon fiber lab full of confidence, and indeed, the strategy worked really well at first. I soon gained a basis of carbon fiber and established my topic, the adulteration of carbon fiber, with the help of my tutor. Everything was clear as daylight. I could almost see the bright road to my research goal, paved by my devotion and hard work.

What I don't know was that the first task was only a beginning. The finding of the plan proved it far more demanding than that of the topic. Indeed, the area where I do experiment has few previous cases, but it also makes me hard to find a research plan. I was like a bull running wildly around the bullring, looking toward all the fields at once, with not the slightest idea about where the aim was. After several kicks on the head, I was shaken to discover that my old way of "trying-and-trying-harder" only gets me back to where I started. What then? When perspiration told me to run around one place forever and ever? Disoriented about the means I use, I clung to the only thing that I still knew-the carbon fiber. Reaching from there, I began to look around something related to it, graphite, nanotube, grapheme, anything that I can grab. The road was uncertain at best, but it was a lot better than wandering everywhere, since I won't get back to the same point again. Miraculously, after three months of torture, I discovered the breakpoint in the area of grapheme, which was a paper about how best to adulterate the grapheme. Not only that, I started to think about the importance of other things than hard work, like strategies.

The stronger blow soon comes, when I began to do the experiments. Of course, I certainly need persistence in the whole process, but in the real experiment, one can never tell when an accident will occur and there was never enough material available for one to try to perfect one's skills. One of my key research materials, the carbon fiber powder, was only 2 grams. In fact, the accidents are quite often in the whole process, and I was forced to be ready to change my plan at any time. The most horrifying moment was when a bottle I used fell and was opened in a tank. It was one of my experiment groups and can easily pollute my other groups. Immediately, the entire tank was filled with transparent yellow liquid while the bottle was contaminated by water in the tank. Forgetting everything about hard work making perfect, I fished out the bottle, abandoned the group and catalogued it to "Yet to observe", which later showed contrary result in degree of graphitization from its previous brothers. To save the whole plan, I was forced to abandon a part of my effort. Then what does striving for one goal means, if I have to constantly discard what I have done?

Still, hard work is the most direct contributor to our daily work, but I also felt the need for other elements. In exerting ourselves, we cannot afford to overlook where we are going; in striving toward a goal, we still need to keep a clear head to make response when the situation doesn't go as expected. Simply trying one'effort to the best, simply keep going to the last breath, may as likely to end up in nowhere as those who tries nothing at all. We need to use strategy to determine where we should put our most strength, and we also need to be ready to abandon the previous work sometimes to sacrifice for higher goods. That 1% of clear reasoning, of guidance, even of luck, is truly as heavy as the rest 99%.