Essay admitted into Emory University in 2017

The lessons we take from failure can be fundamental to later success. Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

I was immensely disappointed when I didn’t hear my name as the winners were being announced. A few seconds before, I was so excited that it might have seemed as if I was waiting to win the Nobel Prize, instead of an award for my project in mathematics at the Scientific and Research Council of Turkey National Projects Competition.

Throughout the 4 days of the Project Fair, I presented my project to over 100 visitors. I was even offered a mentorship by an accomplished mathematics professor, who also visited the fair and seemed very interested in my project, in which I had developed two alternative approaches to methods for expressing power sums in a formula, a complex topic in mathematics previously worked on ...