Peace Corps Scholarship Essay

I want to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer because I feel deeply in debt to all the people I have done volunteer work for. These people have made me stronger, have given me greater understanding of the world around me, have taught me things that I will never find in a book or when sitting in class. Yet I have only been able to give back hours at a time. Due to this, I feel like I have had my time to flourish and grow, and now is my opportunity to really help others do the same. The Peace Corps is my best option to do so because it will allow me to integrate myself fully into volunteer work for a significant time period, it will allow me to work within a potentially novel community to do volunteer work that most benefits them, and will give me the ability to connect directly with those in the community. As my experience teaching at a homeless shelter that takes anyone no matter their situation, I know what it’s like to deal with a variety of challenges. From emotionally grasping the incredibly terrible situations some find themselves in and being able to truly empathize with them, to intellectually having to structure a

Working in research, I had to work on projects that took months to complete. A few times, I came to the end of a 3 or 4 month long project only to realize it was a failure. This failure would sometimes be due to bad chemicals, but more than not it was due to a mistake I had made months before. Dealing with the disappointments and self-loathing was something I didn’t expect to have to face. Yet these failures became an asset when they taught me how to reinforce my work with self-check steps and caution, but most importantly with the ability to learn and grow from a set back. I have learned to not fear failure, but instead see them as opportunities to move forward in a better-developed manner that I would not have been able to do