Coalition Application Essay

Georgia Tech | Coalition Application Essay 2017-2018

Prompt: What is the hardest part of being a teenager now? What’s the best part? What advice would you give a younger sibling or friend (assuming they would listen to you)?

Through my contemporary years of being teenager, I struggled with change. More specifically, “change” as in observing it rather than adjusting to it. While change may be a cliché that many other applicants might have written about, it is not a topic, from my perspective at least, to dismiss so easily. Moreover, the challenge I dealt with is crucial to who I am mainly due to the fact that I continue this process to this day. The change I came to know never had a specific time frame; instead, it existed with me since my birth.

This was mainly due to the fact that when I was first registered for school, my birthdate: November 26 of 2000, was extremely close to the cut-off date for that year. As a result, I often found myself to be one or two years younger than everyone else. Within my first few years as a kid, I was content with myself because being a year younger did not result in me standing out among my peers. In fact, I fit in perfectly at that age since people at that age, people have not necessarily developed their social circles yet. However, as time passed, my one year age gap became especially noticeable during my recent years in high school. This was mainly the fact that during those few years, teenagers take rapid strides in puberty. By the end of my sophomore year, everyone around me was completely different person from who I was

People would learn from the mistake they had made last year, however, in my case, their last year was technically my current year. It was not a rare sight to find me making mistakes that the people of my year committed much before. I believe my most memorable mistake relating to this idea was during my Pre-Calculus class on my junior year, where I would call the trigonometric terms: Sine, Cosine, and Tangent, by their abbreviations on my calculator. (For example, I would say the Cosine as “cos,” or Cotangent as “cot.”) These mistakes were fun to laugh at, but when I consider the fact that these mistakes exist to greater extent of my daily life, I realized that I am different and my whole identity revolved around me changing differently. Over the course 3 years in High School, the mistakes I made are what people identified me with. While many of these mistakes are something I may partially regret, I realize that this “partially” is an underscore of what I see. Many of these mistakes I made happened at a much different circumstance that what others had dealt with before. I was able to make those mistakes in a setting and perception that nobody else could afford. While everyone changed, grew, and matured, I had the opportunity to stay behind and develop an ideology that exceeded well beyond the capacity of others. While I do admit that there are people who may be smarter, I can guarantee that there is