The Second Essay:

1. Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
I’m afraid to admit that I have not lived a life full of excitement and wonders. I was a simple student who studied when needed to and played whenever possible. However, something tremendous, compared to my other minuscule events, happened on the first day of March, the entrance day of Daeil Foreign Language High School.
I was sitting next to my friends before the ceremony began. That was when a teacher came up to me and told me I had to make a short speech in front of everyone that showed up in the ceremony. The announcement took me by pleasure as it shocked me as well. I have never even thought about being the first place among the students that claim themselves as top students of Korea. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I could get into our school. I just had tried my best when I took the entrance exam. After a short rehearsal of my speech, the ceremony started. Soon my name was called upon by the principal of Daeil and I had to deliver the actual speech. Having been so unprepared, I fear I might have made some mistakes. I was glad to receive a round of applause when the badge was given by the principal to me.
I felt proud of myself and that hasn’t happened to me for quite a while. The reason is that I have conflicted with the entire environment around me during my 9th grade in junior high school. The grades, studying for our foreign language high school, coming home late and sleeping when everything was quiet, mixed up and created an enormous amount of stress. I was frequently depressed and thought about the cloudy and foggy future of me. However, all of these were gone at the moment I went down the podium smiling delightedly at myself.
Like any other pleasurable things, there is a drawback of coming to the school as the top, the expectations received from people around me. Parents, teachers, relatives and even close friends predicted that I will be doing something great soon. Those thoughts began to form a huge burden on my back, and I was unable to eliminate the burden. Instead of giving everything up saying that “I can’t do it,” I worked and studied for the mid-tern exam as hard as I could. Although the results were not what people expected, but I was happy to receive the score that I deserved.
This episode has been an interesting one in my whole life. I learned a good lesson by my heart that ‘You will reap what you sow’. I hope this proverb will follow me until the end and become a self-reminder whenever I feel misguided.