Taking Advantage of Educational Opportunities – English 2 page Essay
Prompt – How have you taken advantage of educational opportunities you have had to prepare for college?
There are a number of ways I have taken advantage of educational opportunities to prepare for college. One way I have done this is by taking some of the advanced placement college level courses at school. I have gone through an advanced placement course in Chemistry, and I am currently taking advanced placement courses in
Physics and Calculus BC. Also, I completed college level Geometry at a local community college over a summer vacation. I thought it would be of great advantage to me to challenge myself and experience college-level classes and honor classes as well as to prepare myself for the rigorous courses that are offered at Universities.
Secondly, I was Chosen as one of the three students from my school out of many applicants to attend an after school pre-engineering course. In this course, I was able to experience what engineers really do on the job. I see engineering as potential career path, and I applied for this course because I wanted to find out what engineering is all about to establish a fundamental knowledge of the many different career opportunities, benefits of the occupation, and ultimately to prepare myself for a potential engineering major.
Also, during one summer vacation, I eagerly signed up for a speed-reading course to improve my reading and comprehension skills and to learn how to read more quickly and efficiently. This reading class stressed that being able to read quickly, more efficiently, and with better understanding, proves to be invaluable skills for high school and college students.
As part of my school math competition team, I learned very useful skills in how to attack certain problems, usually difficult ones, which are given on the tests taken by our team. The team adviser taught my teammates and me how to attack problems more quickly and accurately, by minimizing error, and breaking down the problems into parts instead of tackling the problem as a whole. I signed up for the school math competition team wanting to test my math skills and improve them as well, knowing that having better math skills would give me a jump start in college.
When my friends and sister rely on me to tutor them and help them with their homework, I see it as an educational opportunity to prepare for college because I can establish a more solid understanding of a certain subject, whether it is math problems or grammar and spelling. I help my sister and my friends frequently with their schoolwork that they don’t understand. This way, my knowledge becomes broader. Whenever I help them with something, I re-learn the material in the process, and therefore I establish a more solid understanding.
Not only have I taken advantage of educational opportunities in classes, but also on the Internet. I hold a strong interest in computers, and it is my strongest ambition right now to major in computer science, and engineering is a strong ambition as well. I wanted to have a basic start in computers, so I found some tutorials online that taught certain things. HTML, a computer language read by Internet browser software to display a web page in many different ways, was one language I put a lot of concentration into. I know most of that language, and I have started a little into other languages as well.
The numbers of different ways in which I have taken advantage of educational opportunities have truly given me a sense of confidence. At this moment I feel that what I have done has paid off and that I am prepared for a college level education.