Scholarship is the primary reason people go off to college in the first place. Investing in your education is the single most important thing you can do to yourself in order to increase your odds of success in the world. Longwood has provided me with so many different opportunities and challenges in order to better myself academically. School has always been a sort of uphill battle for me when it came to my grades. I had always been a good student in terms of comprehension of the material, but I never had the drive to really push myself beyond my natural limits. I was always content with what I could achieve naturally, never seeking to improve myself and breaking my limits. I had always told myself “Good enough.” but Longwood has truly pushed me to go above and beyond, and to better myself in every way that I can. One example in particular, a paper that I wrote as a final project, shows off just how I have grown as a scholar. This paper is titled “A Family Dinner”. This paper was my final project for my English class. In this short story, I tell a tale about a dysfunctional family that finally boils over during a dinner one night. In this paper, the reader can tell that I have learned and grown as an academic here at Longwood. I have learned to construct and present the conflict of a story in a way that conveys the emotions of the current situation without actually spelling out the emotions of the situation to the reader. I let them form their own thoughts on the matter at hand, and I think this marks an important step in not just my growth as a writer, but as a scholar as well. Being able to effectively communicate and write is an incredibly important skill no matter where you go in life. I no longer tell myself “Good enough.” Every day I strive to constantly improve and shatter my previous academic limits in order to truly better myself. I am glad that my time at Longwood has helped me become more academically gifted.