Taking advantage of a significant educational opportunity or overcoming an educational barrier

University of California Essay

Q: Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced.

Response: It's okay to fail, but it is not okay if you do not learn from the mistakes that led to that failure.

In 11th grade, I changed my optional subject from Economics to Computer Science midway through the school year. I made this decision after seeing my friend write codes on the bus and realising that Computer Science involved a lot of Mathematics.

While attending Computer Science classes at school, I had set a goal in my mind, namely, to learn how to code. I started the class with great enthusiasm, but things started to go downhill after a little time. I realised that Computer Science was not just raw mathematics, as it also involved a lot of other things such as looping, code structure and algorithms. While I was trying to understand the basic concepts of programming such as my peers were learning advanced programming concepts such as data structures and loops. After a little time in the classes, I started to feel inferior to my classmates as all of them had a better understanding of the subject than me. I felt ashamed of asking doubts to my peers and teacher, as I was having a tough time to solve problems that they could solve easily. I started to fear the subject and, as a result, performed miserably on the final test.

One thing that sports has taught me through all these years is getting up after falling down. I tried to figure out my mistakes and found where I went wrong. To perform well in the subject, I had to remove its fear as well as understand its basic concepts. I did this by staying after school, online courses and clearance of doubts with the help of my peers and mentors. I worked hard and finally raised my marks by a significant margin. Although I may not have gotten an extremely high score, I am still proud of it as the increase represents the efforts that I had put in throughout the year.

Post this experience, I have furthered my Computer Science skills by learning new programming languages, working on a project combining engineering and CS and also volunteered to teach Computer Science to blind students.

I wanted to know whether it is good or if it sounds cliched. Also feel free to give any suggestions that would improve the essay. Thanks in advance!

It is confusing to read. The best way to approach this essay is to first discuss what you excel at, which is sports. Explain why you excel at sports and what you have learned from it. Then apply the lesson to your interest in Coding and Computer Science. You will need to write a introduction using sports, a transition paragraph that will introduce the lesson you learned from sports and its application to Computer Science. Then, you will have to write about your misconception, the difficulties, and how you overcame it using sports analogies. That way the connection between sports as a method of overcoming an obstacle is clear and defined from the start.

Your presentation is choppy at the moment. Your ideas lack proper connecting presentations which would give more meaning to your narrative. Try to use more transitional phrases or words that will create a fluid thought connection for the paragraph information as you present it. I have already given you some clues above as to how you can do that. I hope that you can apply it to your essay. This version is only a draft, a workable version that can still be perfected.