Working and studying time - Write a short essay on something of personal importance to you.

Hi all, this scholarship essay is pretty short as I have a guideline of 150-200 words. Please feel free to give me your feedback / how I can better improve? Thanks a lot!

strong determination

Personally, I would say having strong determination is important to achieve our goals. Prior to my GCE O-Level period, my mum who is diagnosed with bipolar disorder have started acting abnormal.

It was a period of enormous stress for me as I have to deal with her illness while juggling academic work. She would often accuse us of wrongdoing; even though we did not do anything. She would create a scene almost every day and we will then have to deal with the consequences.

As things were getting out of control, I maximize my studying time and revise my work whenever possible. I also encouraged myself not to give up as the situation is only temporary, but a poor grade would not get me where I want. There were also days that I could not attend school as I had to take care of her. I would then contact my friends to catch up on school work and not to miss out any learning.

With the strong determination to succeed, I eventually scored 8 points for my O-Level and successfully enrolled into my preferred course. I have proved to myself that if there is a will, there is a way.

The response does not feel right. Something of importance to you should be a belief system, a personal value, or something or someone that has helped you to become a better person. The paper starts out doing just that but, when you start talking about your mother, the focus of the discussion changes, making the paper about a horrific time in your life instead. That does not fall in line with the "something of personal importance" to you. What you can do is reverse the presentation to suit the prompt.

First, discuss your mother's mental instability and how it affected you. Explain how the treatment led you to become a determined person. Your desire to get away from her should have driven the development of your self-determination in this essay. Explain the way by which you discovered that you are a determined person and why you believe that this character trait is very important to you. Relate it to the development of your maturity as a person, try to veer away from the discussion about your mother at this point. She must only be a catalyst, but not the main topic of the essay. You could however, explain that your mother-daughter relationship was the basis of your determination to succeed in your studies. Aside from your studies though, you should try to depict another instance when your determination helped you in life. that way you show two instances of the importance of determination in your life, making it more applicable to the prompt requirements.