For DonorsFor Applicants

Grassroot Heroics Scholarship

Funded by
user profile avatar
Anthony Tran
$1,500
1 winner$1,500
Awarded
Application Deadline
Sep 15, 2024
Winners Announced
Oct 15, 2024
Education Level
High School
3
Contributions
Eligibility Requirements
Education Level:
High school senior
State:
OR

The hero’s journey describes a universal arc of personal growth through the experience of facing significant obstacles, daunting setbacks, and uncertain outcomes. 

In facing our personal challenges, we can discover individual greatness that lies within each of us. A career, much like life, should not be limited to a single pathway. Being on your own hero’s journey requires adaptability and openness to change in your professional pursuits. 

This scholarship aims to empower students to pursue diverse career paths and embrace the uncertainty of an unwritten future and the potential of great opportunity. 

Any high school senior in Oregon may apply for this scholarship, whether they plan to attend college, learn a trade, earn a technical certification, or enroll in a professional training program. 

To apply, tell us about the challenges you have faced in high school, how you worked through these obstacles, and how your growth journey has impacted you and affected your professional goals.

Selection Criteria:
Ambition, Drive, Impact
Published June 13, 2024
Essay Topic

Describe the most significant challenge(s) you faced during the last four years of school. Explain what actions you took to understand and overcome these obstacles. Reflect on how this journey of growth has impacted you and what role it plays in your professional pursuits.

600–800 words

Winning Application

James Weynand
Lincoln High SchoolPortland, OR
The absolute most significant challenge I've faced during my entire high school experience has been my own mind. To put that more specifically, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. If you don't really know what that is, it's a mental disorder causes a sort of turbo-anxiety about the tiniest (or literally nonexistent) things, and you have to do things in very specific patterns or rituals, known as compulsions, to calm it down and prevent a - made up - disaster from occurring. (Of course, doing them just feeds the anxiety so it becomes stronger every time you encounter it so the way to fight it is to ignore the urge to do compulsions, but I digress). Compulsions also don't actually work most of the time, because your brain has to make sure that they happen absolutely perfectly on an arbitrary scale. That means you might have to repeat the same thing dozens of times before you're finally let go. Because compulsions usually demand that you stop whatever you're doing to perform them, OCD can become EXTREMELY debilitating. OCD is with you from birth, but it normally only starts showing itself in your early teens. Mine first developed about a year before my freshman year of high school. It started up at the beginning of December, and the main topic for it was worrying that something bad would happen before Christmas. Basically every single day until the 25th was absolutely constant stress. I would develop stomach aches and headaches almost daily, and could barely function because I was on such high alert for the smallest things. I had a ritual I had to complete before I went to bed, and it could take me an entire hour some days. When Christmas finally came, I was exhausted, but relieved. I thought that since Christmas was here, the crazy stress I had been feeling would finally go away. Guess what happened? No, it didn't go away. It became less strong though, and I was finally able to consciously process what on earth had just happened to me. A few months later I was formally diagnosed with OCD. Stress can agitate OCD, making you more sensitive to being triggered by small things and less able to resist compulsions. With that in mind, let's go through my first year or so of high school. I was dealing with compulsions during school every day (before that, school was all online so it wasn't a big deal). Most of them were just me having to take weird roundabout routes to my classes and things like that, so not too bad, but there was one that was destroying me. If I thought the "wrong" thing while writing or typing, I would have to erase what I wrote and rewrite it, even having to rephrase it to 'avoid' the thought in the worst cases. It was stopping me from doing tons of things and, although it was less debilitating than the December event, it was getting dangerously close to being as stressful. Something had to change. I started practicing a special type of treatment I learned in therapy where you intentionally trigger the OCD and then resist doing the compulsions. Let me tell you, that's the strangest feeling ever. It's like a weird combo of unbearable agony and joy. I just kept going, destroying all those walls my brain had built, and over months and years, slowly, I started to gain ground in this crazy internal war I had going on. My most recent year of high school was the best I've ever had. I was happy, making tons of friends, and actually being able to focus in school. Although compulsions can still pop up when I'm under a lot of stress, some days go by without a single one worth noting. It's something I honestly never thought I would experience again, but it's just as nice as I remembered. My experience with OCD has permanently changed me, though. I learned so much about mental health and psychology, and I've really become a more empathetic and caring person. It's helped me understand what other people are going through, and most importantly, how to help them. It's even made me consider studying something psychology-related in college to keep helping others more effectively. To this day, I'm still fighting that never-ending war, and learning new things about myself and my wonderful mind. It's become a big part of my life that I find a lot of satisfaction in sharing, in the off-chance that someone else out there suffering in the same way might hear it. OCD isn't something I would wish on my worst enemy, but if I had the option to go back and erase it from myself, it would be a tough choice.

FAQ

When is the scholarship application deadline?

The application deadline is Sep 15, 2024. Winners will be announced on Oct 15, 2024.