Question:

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success.
Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what
did you learn from the experience?

Response:
A challenge I have faced and continue to face throughout my life is being the youngest
child. While it may seem like there is not much wrong with that, being the youngest has put forth
a couple challenges. First of all, since all three of my older siblings have had huge amounts of
success academically, that has put high expectations on me to perform as well as most of the
time better than them. The road to perform as well as my siblings has been very tough on me as I
have had to work my hardest on everything school related just to meet the expectations of my
parents. This has affected me because I felt as though I had no other option but to work hard in
school because I did not want to disappoint my parents. Throughout all of this experience, I have
learned that as long as I try hard, I will not only outperform my older siblings and exceed
expectations, but I will also make my parents proud. Also, this challenge of meeting the
academic expectations my parents have for me has taught me some effective study habits that
will aid me in my college career. Additionally, another challenge the “baby” sibling will face is
just that, being treated like the baby of the family for your whole life. While this has brought
some perks such as being allowed to stay up later than my siblings were allowed to at my age,
and being able to watch PG-13 movies long before my thirteenth birthday, I generally feel like
being the baby child is not the best. First off, my parents are always overprotective of me, and
never let me do the things that my siblings were allowed to do. This made me feel as though I
was being deprived of certain experiences. In order to get rid of their guard, I had to make
multiple attempts to reason and persuade my parents to let me do a certain thing. However, after
I partook in that thing, which only has negatives, I realized why my parents tried protecting me
from that thing. For example, in this past year, my parents went out of town without me for a
weekend, and they wanted me to stay at my grandparent’s house until they got back. Obviously,
I was not enthused about spending the weekend with them, and so I tried and tried to get them to
allow me to stay home alone until they finally did. During that weekend, I grew very lonely and I
had no one to interact with, and at that moment I knew why my parents wanted me to stay with
my grandparents. From that particular experience, I learned that, while I may feel like my parents
are being to protective over me, they really know what is best for me. By trying to get past the
obstacle of showing my parents that they do not need to be over-protective of me, I learned that
this was not necessarily a challenge that I needed to overcome.