Reflective Essay For College

During my freshmen year of college, I was determined and motivated to manage my competitive boxing career and secondary education. Balancing both boxing and college coursework was challenging. My rigorous training involved running three to five miles a day, lifting weights to build up my strength, spending countless hours punching the heavy bags, and sparring. Since I was competing, I was training six days out of the week. I competed in amateur boxing events ranging from club shows to regional tournaments and my resolution to achieve the goal of being the best has led me to victory after victory. However, my success in boxing did not reflect success in my academic life.

In the first few months of the Fall Semester of 2015, the work load was anything but rigorous. My professors were excellent and the readings assigned were manageable. The only challenge was my lecture course. Without any prior experience in a lecture-oriented class, my primary method of learning in classroom was by asking direct questions during a lesson in a

smaller size classroom. Therefore, I was unaware of my growth as a student, because of the lack of opportunities to ask questions during lecture. I was not prompted to consistently learn and did not feel the need to learn an additional material for the final, due to my unawareness. The end of the semester approached and the grade I received for the lecture course was a grade letter of B. With thorough evaluation, my poor time management between training and studying was the reason I received that grade for the lecture course.

The Spring Semester of 2016 proved to be one of the most difficult semesters, because I fought in the New York Metropolitan Boxing Regional Tournament at 108 lbs.

Of course, I no longer weighed 108 lbs., but 125 lbs. This meant I had to put even more work into losing the weight to meet the weight division. The physical strain on my body affected my focus in class. There would be days that I had to take an exam midday without an ounce of food in my stomach. I had to keep fighting, because my determination to succeed was greater than the pain within me. Despite this challenge, I made the weight and made it to the finals of the tournament and to my final exams in college, while enduring my intense diet. The Spring Semester of 2016 was left as a correction for the blunders of the previous semester. I was able to do so by having better time management and adapting my method of learning by supplementing my resources to attend multiple

lectures.

In retrospect, I have learned from my past mistakes. I faced the challenge of poor time management when juggling with the responsibilities of my daily life, and I have adapted my method of learning to the accommodations of a lecture-oriented course. Although I do have to live with the past circumstances that adversely affected my academic performance, they can still serve as a reminder of what needs to be done in order to handle the more rigorous demands of the future, such as medical school. In medical school, I can apply my resilience in the classroom to correct any mistakes I make and keep moving forward, preventing them from happening again.