College Question Essay #1

Describe the personal experience that gave you to feeling of greatest achievement or satisfaction because of the challenges you met.

I have been Greek dancing since I was four years old and I have always loved it. I had heard about the older girls going to the competition, but I was too young to go with them. In fact, I was still too young when I went for my first time in 4th grade, but they let me go anyway. The second competition I went to was when I was in 5th grade and it's the one that is still the most amazing one I've been to.

The competition was in Greenville, SC. We had been practicing for a couple of weeks and then about a month before the competition was to take place, our dance instructor told us she couldn't go anymore and therefore, the group couldn't go either. All of us dancers tried our best to still be able to go, but nothing was working. We all cried because competition is one of our favorite things to go to and it had been taken from us.

The week of the competition, a meeting was called together. By then there were about 7 or 8 of us that still wanted to go. So the very few of us got together, along with our parents, to discuss our predicament... again. At this meeting though, we learned something new. The chairman of the competition had called my mom. He was very upset when he heard that Wilmington wasn't going. He told my mom that we just had to go because it wouldn't be the same without us; he said everyone loves Wilmington. After hearing that, we fought even harder to go. We still couldn't believe that we weren't going.

Eventually our instructor gave in. She still couldn't go, but she appointed one of the older girls in our group to act as director. We practiced our hardest. We would go to church as soon as we were all out of school and we would practice and practice until about ten o'clock at night. We did this for four days and then we had to leave for competition. We figured we didn't really have a chance since the other groups had been practicing for months on end, and us... we only had four days. Also, our group was made up of 7 girls, while all the other groups had about 20 boys and girls. We were the smallest one.

We went there with positive attitudes. We were doing something that we all shared a love for and we wanted to show that. Even though we all knew we would show our love for it, we still wanted to do well. We practiced all night when we got there and the next morning before we went on. We were determined to do well.

We went on stage and we danced our hearts out. We were smiling the whole time; we had done amazing. All of our steps were perfectly in-sync and we had plenty of "kefi". (Kefi is one of the criteria the groups are graded on. It means how much smiling there was and if they could tell that we really loved it.) We were all so proud of ourselves. The other groups even told us that we did amazing.

At the awards banquet the next day, some of our dancers were very doubtful. They didn't think we had done well, but most of us thought we did great. We told the pessimistic people to please be quiet and listen because we still had a chance. As the announcer called the winners of the silver and bronze medals, some girls said, "We aren't going to win anything. Let's just go. This is embarrassing." And others of us said, "No we are going to stay. We still have a chance and if we didn't win then we are going to cheer on whoever did."

He called out the winner of the gold medal... and it was us! We had won! It was the most amazing feeling. Everyone cried tears of joy and we all screamed and hugged and jumped around. We had won the gold with only four days of practicing; we didn’t give up and it really paid off.