College Admissions Essay: The Value Of Hard Work

As the youngest in a family of five, my growth has been influenced greatly by my family. We have never had much money, sometimes not even enough for the necessities. Yet somehow my parents never allowed us to want for anything. I can remember the winter we couldn’t afford heat, my father and cousin built a wood furnace and a system of pipes to fill my house. My parents taught me how to be a problem solver, and how to use my natural analytical thinking to my advantage. Although their resourcefulness is not the only thing I acquired; that kind of experience taught me something much more important: the value of hard work. I cannot remember a time when either of my parents were not working two jobs. No matter what they had to do, they got it done. I grew up knowing the value of a dollar and knowing that I would have to work hard in life to succeed in the ambitious ways that I wanted to,

I love working; I love to keep busy, to make relationships with my coworkers; and, above all, to experience that satisfying feeling of clocking out of another day of hard work. My first semester as an undergraduate student I decided to take a year off of working to focus on my studies. By November I was on the bus heading to my shift at Dollar Tree. I did not fill out that application because I blew through my savings, I hurried to find a job because I was bored. I could not handle the wasted time I had every night after classes and studies were done. I needed that sense of accomplishment again. This is part of the reason I applied to be a Resident Assistant. Although, I have known I was going to be an RA since my sister came home from college and described an RA as “the student on the floor that is the boss and helps the other students.” I knew that was going to be my role, and since my first summer training session I knew my job meant much more than being the policing mom that it is stereotyped