National Merit Scholarship Essay

I may be given awards and titles, but the achievements that I value as the most significant are the ones where I improve myself or others in some way.
At the beginning of my junior year I signed up to take the PSAT, hoping for a great score but not fully expecting one. For the weeks after the tests, the curiosity about my results was put on the back burner as I focused on school and extracurriculars. The day my school received the result forms, my counselor called me into her office and informed me that because of my high score, I might be eligible for a National Merit scholarship. I was absolutely ecstatic, and hearing that news gave me confidence in my own abilities and pushed me to become a better student in school. I learned about a week ago that I did not advance to
History Student” my junior year. Since I was little, I have never been good at, nor interested, in history. This changed my junior year when I fell head over heels for my US History class. The past two years when I had taken the AP tests for my history classes, I made mediocre scores. And the thing is, I wasn’t even bothered because that was how disinterested I was in those classes. However, when I took the AP exam for US History, I was able to get a 5 on the exam thanks to the hundreds of hours of work put into studying. At the end of the year, I also received the Outstanding Student award, for a class that I never thought I would excell in. Because of this, I was also inspired to see history through the the eyes of my grandparents and their elder friends, who could describe the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in much more detail to me than a textbook. That’s why this award is so special and significant to me, because it represents the hard work and time I put in to become a better and more educated person overall, and also because it represents the curiosity of