It is valid to say that the majority of young individuals and high school graduates regard education as a priority because it provides opportunities to succeed later in life by getting a fine and desired job. However, it certainly is not very easy to graduate from a university and obtain a degree. One of the reasons for this is that being a student, a person is exposed to a lot of stressors and pressures on a daily basis, including an expectation to show excellent academic results, as well as the needs to balance studying and personal interests, to earn money to cover debts and support living, et cetera. Multiple external and internal factors can substantially influence the way one performs in a college. It is possible to say that the presence of support sources and possession of skills and flexibility needed to overcome existing obstacles to successful studying are essential in avoiding big failures during the pursuit of a degree.
In my case, the most challenging barrier to receiving the undergraduate degree was the absence of financial assistance. Currently, both of my parents are studying as well so I do not have a chance to refer to them for financial support and, unfortunately, I was not regarded as eligible for the scholarship by either community foundations or the college. For these reasons, I had to work part-time in a nursing home in order to earn some money to support myself and proceed with my education. In the given situation, time management was one of the largest issues for me, and I struggled with balancing my attention across various domains of life at first. Since the largest part of the day during weekends I spent working, sometimes it was hard to keep up with the pace of learning expected from students in the college. Nevertheless, I was always very much aware of the benefits one can gain through education and a need to study hard despite all possible hardships. Moreover, my interest in medicine was and remains extremely strong. Thus, I have found a way to cope with excess stress and to improve my academic performance by trial and error.
Through this experience, I learned that self-discipline and self-organization are keys to success in both educational and professional spheres because they help to manage time, which is one of the principal resources required for acquiring a great variety of skills and excellence. Therefore, I began to set right priorities whereas education was always the first and the foremost one. Since I did not have a proper and a regular income and could not get money from anyone and anywhere else, I continued working in the nursing home. However, for this, I allocated just enough time to earn a sufficient sum for buying gasoline needed to get to the college by car and purchasing some other essential things that could facilitate my progress in studying. I also started to develop short-term and long-term academic progress plans, which included a few clearly defined learning objectives serving for me as orientation points and metrics for the evaluation of current achievements. This self-organization tool allowed me to estimate my abilities and needs realistically based on time availability, and helped to control and modify the learning process better.
Financial problems are probably the primary barriers to obtaining a high-quality education and better studying for many individuals. However, it is always possible to find a way to attain the formulated goal if you really want it. In my case, strong motivation to become a competent health care practitioner and serve the members of my community in the future gave me the strength to not give up. The challenges did not break me and, by facing them, I understood that I had made a right choice of profession and future career because my interest in medicine continued to grow when my knowledge about it kept on developing more and more throughout the semester. Because of the described experience associated with financial challenges and the coping mechanism they provoked, I now look forward to my further academic path with optimism. I believe that by improving self-discipline and implementing time management principles, I became more adaptable to adverse circumstances and managed to enhance the capability for learning and acquiring new competencies, which will allow me to make a valuable contribution to medicine through the provision of high-quality medical care to patients in the future.
Overall, the lessons I learned during this challenging time will be useful in many ways. First of all, they will assist in fulfilling my major objective of acquiring high-standard practical skills in the field of my interest. Secondly, I will be able to apply the same coping and self-evaluation tools during my career in order to develop comprehensive long-term plans for continual self-improvement and enhancement of professional competence. Based on this, I view the design and implementation of the strategy aimed at overcoming obstacles to studying as a significant milestone on the path towards academic and professional self-realization.