Mason's Personal Essays

 What's your relationship with procrastination?😱😱😱 Unless you’re a superhuman, procrastination is something that you’ve had to deal with. That feeling of staring at the screen and creating excuses to put it off for another day as dread looms over you. Can I pull off another miracle? While others might view procrastination as beneficial to their life, for me, it has always been a painful source of uneasiness that I’m willing to do anything to get rid of. Except actually do the work of course, that’s too much to ask for. Weirdly enough, I never procrastinated through middle school and it was uni that really brought out the hidden demon that I seemingly can’t shake off. Throughout online school, zoom classes and asynchronous classes (my beloved) only seemed to magnify my tendency to procrastinate. The abundance of freedom and lack of immediate consequences, when it came to assignments and sometimes even attendance, allowed me to act on my impulsive desires. This is one of the rea...

Prompt: When have you succeeded when you thought you would fail? Finally understanding a new topic about something you’ve been trying to learn is rewarding, but it’s learning and understanding the new concept that’s the toughest part. Math at school never really posed much of a challenge, so during Junior Year, I decided to self-study the AP Calculus BC exam without any previous knowledge. I thought this exam would be easy.  I learned early on that the “pre” in precalculus was a lie. In most courses for math, each topic builds upon previous knowledge. Though precalculus may have given us the bare essentials needed to do a problem in calculus, the topics in calculus didn’t really build upon those bare essentials. Rather, it focused on learning new topics, something that I hadn’t done in a long time and wasn’t quite used to.  The toughest barrier came from trying to find the “area of 3D solids.” After spending countless hours on the concept of the isosceles triangles, I still st...