Live within my means and be honest - NTU Scholarship Essay

Hello everyone. I'm currently applying for NTU's Scholarship and I wanted advices to improve my essay.

Question:
Describe, in less than 300 words, the values and beliefs you hold strongly to. Please provide examples of how you have demonstrated these in your actions.

Singapore is my first choice

My answer:
Before Year 12, I often had high expectations of myself. As the amount of projects and tests increased significantly in Year 11, I cannot remain my good performance in every subjects. Throughout the year, I was very depressed, and my pressure constantly stacks up until I finished my SPM examination. As expected, my SPM result is the reflection of my bad performance. I know from that moment on, I must live within my means, and this is the belief I hold until now. On Year 12, I learned to lower down my expectations to myself, and I made a study plan that is suitable to me. At last, I passed my UEC examination with flying colours, I am satisfied, and I know the belief I am holding is right.

Besides, I value honesty very much, especially to myself. No one is perfect, with this belief, it is not hard for me to boost my confidence after failure. I am being honest to myself by not covering up my failures, instead, I insist to find a way to overcome a certain issue. I am not good in English at first, I will just admit the fact whenever someone talked about it, knowing that my target is study in Singapore, I did my best in improving my English level in my last two years in high school.

I am always striving to do my best because it is my dream to study in overseas, and Singapore is my first choice. Now that I know I am capable to pursue my dream in Singapore, I will do my best in NTU and let my parents and the university proud of me.

Any critiques and corrections are welcomed! Thank you in advance for taking your time to read, it would be nice if you can help!

Sylvia, you should reverse paragraph 2 and paragraph 1 in terms of presentation in the essay. Paragraph 2 has the value that you hold strongly to so that should kick off the start of the essay. Presenting that first offers the reviewer an interesting hook that just might keep him glued to the essay that you wrote. The second paragraph, delivers the example based upon your actions that the prompt instructions requires. I think that you should create a new opening statement that better suits the expectations of the reviewer. Something along these lines should work best for your purposes:

First paragraph: I value honesty very much, especially to myself. ...I insist to find a way to overcome a certain issue.

Second paragraph: Before Year 12 ...I know the belief I am holding is right.

That's it. These are all the paragraphs that you need in order to accurately respond to the prompt in less than 300 words. The rest of your current presentation are irrelevant to the prompt and do not help to further prove the strength of your honesty. What you can do at this point is develop a new closing statement instead. One that reiterates the reason why you hold strongly to the importance of honesty in yourself and others.