The essay is for APIASF Scholarship. The prompt is:In 500 words or less, please describe any challenges you have faced personally, financially or academically that you have had to overcome. How have you dealt with the challenges you have faced? How have these barriers or your success in overcoming challenges affected your goals and personal character? If you do not have any extracurricular/community service involvement, you may use this space to tell us why.
Right now, my essay is work on progress. It has 588 words, and the essay must be 500 or less. Please give me guidance. Recommend some stuff to omit, and help me polish this essay. What should I change and everything? Please, and Thank you. All helps are appreciated.
Everything we do affects our success and our failure as well as our future. There is always an obstruction that blocks our way, whatever our choices might be. A failure does not define anything; instead, it gives us the advantage to turn negatives to positives. For me, a challenge that I had to face was the language barrier upon migrating to Hawaii, and some unexpected difficulty academic courses. Either way, they both affected my growth from being nobody to a notable somebody. These barriers made me realize my passions and what I want to be.
[...]
For starters, you can omit your opening paragraph. That introduction does not really tell the admissions officer anything about you in relation to the prompt so you don't really need that paragraph there. Omitting it will not only help you regain valuable word count and hopefully, bring down your word count as well, but it immediately focus the attention of the reader upon your specific response to the prompt. You must consider revising your final paragraph to include a statement about what you learned about yourself and how this lesson has become a sort of guiding light for you at present. That would be a more effective close for the essay rather than simply enumerating the classes that you have taken since that time when you conquered your failure. It is alright if you want to retain the portion about the way you are thanking your teacher in a way for being hard on you because it turned you into a successful student. That is one of the highlights of your paper and could definitely help its content improve and create that sense of connection between you and the unseen teacher "experience" on paper.
Thank you very much. This is the new and revised one. Please once again, help me see if something is wrong with it. Grammar checks or context checks. Check check check.
When I moved to Hawaii, my first affliction was the language barrier. A person who just recently moved to a country is marked as F.O.B and attracts some attention. People were talking to me in English, and my brain couldn't comprehend. The barrier hinders me from everything. There were so many things that I wanted to do and learn. At that point, I had to become my own teacher and teach myself.
[...]
Kezzo, kindly review your essay for tense usage. You are writing an essay about events that occurred in the past. Yet you have a mix of past and present tense usage in the sentences. Please revise the sentences to ensure that the reflection of the statements are only in past tense as that is the proper tense usage for this essay narrative. You should also separate the topic paragraphs clearly. At the moment, the paragraphs seem to be mixed into one long paragraph which makes it difficult to read and does not prepare the reader very well for the topic changes in the paragraphs. Try to explain the lessons that you learned from every obstacle at the end of the related paragraph before finally closing the essay with the collective single lesson that all of the combined situations provided you. That will make the essay feel better thought-out and developed. This is definitely a better version of the first one but can use some more editing to bring down the word count so that you can provide more detailed explanations of the areas I pointed out. Review the essay and from your personal choices, choose which portions you think you can omit in order to further improve the essay. Let me know if you have a problem with that so that I can offer some suggestions regarding which portions to omit :-)
So, you mean I only have to choose one of them? The language barrier or academic problem?
I also think I need to omit one of them, but I feel like these are the two challenges that change me the most, so I tried to put them both. However, for the sake of the essay, I have to focus on one, but I don't know which one, so I do have a problem on that one.
From a reader's perspective, please give me more suggestions.
Yes, you need to focus the essay on only one situation so that you can properly develop the essay. Right now, trying to tell two stories at once tends to confuse the essay and your development of the central theme of the paper. I know it is difficult to choose the topic that you would like to best discuss because the stories you presented seem to carry equal weight. Of the two however, I believe that you should develop the language barrier story the most because that was the biggest obstacle that you had to overcome. It was only after beating that situation that you were able to further progress with your studies, which in turn led to the problem with Dysart. So my advice, is to discuss the root obstacle only because overcoming it enabled you to progress with your studies and improve your learning abilities.
Here is the updated version of the essay. Thank you so much for helping me. I'm hoping to receive another feedback.
I change depends on the setting, whether I migrate from the other side of the world where the languages and cultures are different, or face a challenge that forces me out of my comfort zone; either way I always find a way to get through it.
In comparison to Philippines, where everyone is practically speaks the same language to live in harmony and tackle the vile obstruction of agony, the language barrier when I moved in to Hawaii is where I mostly changed. When I moved in to Hawaii, my first affliction was the language and the communication. I was marked as a FOB (Fresh of the Boat), a term to degrade immigrant kids. As a FOB, I receive some unwanted attentions due to the barrier and my shy personality; everyone was asking me about where I came from or something related to Philippines. It seemed like they were talking to me in a language that my brain doesn't comprehend and just placed me down in a bedlam. My only response was to slowly nod, meticulously saying "Yes", or acquiesces to their question. It was torture to encounter that situation every day. At that point, I realized that I don't have to deal with that situation anymore, which made me realized that I had to become my own teacher and teach myself. After innumerable times of listening to people's discourse of the language, I eventually gradually learned the divine diction of English, and an unexplainable feeling struck me-- an extravagant enjoyment feeling that tasted like the fruit of my perseverance after months of slaving over the dictionary like a scholar trying to cryptanalyze the code of discovery. I was forced to teach and change myself with knowledge helped me adapt my environment, in my case, learning the English language. Though my accent remains, it is an indication of my growth to language literacy. I had a new goal when I learned the language, which is mastering the language, be persuasive and silver-tonged. I thirst for eloquence and fluency after realizing the significance and strength of words and communication.
Through that ordeal, I didn't just change myself from speaking a language, but also, I learned how to be independent-which helps me for the rest of my life. The barrier hindered to everything that I wanted to fulfill. I wanted to learn more; I wanted to make friends; I wanted to be somebody, and not just a typical shy person in the corner; I wanted to break my shell, but I couldn't because of the barrier. However, in the end, my whole personality rapidly grew after breaking down the barrier. I changed myself from being invisible in the corner to the center of competitive honor roll ranking whose desire is to be eminent and show my undeveloped potentials. I changed myself by trying to step up my games through participating in all sorts of activities. And most of all, I changed myself because I wanted to be more.