Being Independent - Essay to apply APU scholarship

difficult personal challenge or situation

" how to be independent" has challenged me a lot when I made it to high school and had to live far away from my hometown. Although my grandparents let me stay in their house, they can barely take care of themselves so I have to stand on my own feet. As a freshman I allocated my time and energy into schooling and assignments. Despite trying my best, my life didn't improve. The struggle with life helped me realise that education with little practice I recieved at school made my completely ignorant when I enter the real life, as the education system in Vietnam values academic knowledge rather than its applications. Therefore I began to grasp our society, learn useful skills and broaden my horizons. It was my grandparents who showed me ways to health improvement. Thanks to their advice, I am now leading healthy lifestyles with great immune system and no more drug abuse. Together with main education at school, I have also developed my academic pursuits through YouTube, as this gives me opportunities to be exposed to many cultural background and to gain more understanding. YouTube is also my cook teacher, my cooking was aweful at first but I managed to survive up to date. I started to build up relationship, to go many places in order to train social skills. For instance: striking an ideal bargain at the food store , I found this much more fascinating than sitting at one place for 8 hours a day, did nothing but studied. And it was lucky for me to be offered a position in a private language centre with free training while working there. With experiences I have gone through, I am now becoming autonomous gradually and still have several things to explore.

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Quang, the prompt is not asking you to write about an obstacle that you are still currently tackling to overcome. Rather, you have to choose a situation that served to be an obstacle, which you have already successfully dealt with. That means, you have to write about the experience of identifying your problem, explaining why you consider it an obstacle, and how you arrived at the solution to the problem. The current essay that you are presenting does not follow this line of writing because you have yet to find a solution to the obstacle of becoming independent. The statement you wrote does not respond properly to the question. I hope I was able to explain to you what exactly you have to write about in order to address the prompt in the proper manner. It would be better if you wrote a new essay after properly considering what sort of topic the prompt actually wants you to discuss.

Consider any topic that will prove a sense of maturity, responsibility, or enlightenment. These are the normal response statements to this type of scholarship question. The reviewer wants to be sure that you are a person who is mature enough mentally to undertake such a line of study. This can only be proven by your ability to overcome an obstacle in your life. How to be independent is not really a unique or personal obstacle as everyone undergoes that process in life. Try to find a more personal topic for your discussion that somehow helps the reviewer get to know how you have matured and the extent of your maturity as a young adult.