Candray 1

Leandro Candray

Period 4 ERWC

Mrs. Wold

January 15th, 2020

Scholarship Essay

My name is Leandro Candray, I am currently 18 years old and I live in Temecula,

California. In the 4 years of high school that I have been in, I spent a large portion of my time

running for the Great Oak Cross Country team and the Great Oak Track & Field team. Over the

course of these 4 years I have learned how to be a leader for the team, what it takes to be a

successful top-end runner, the sacrifices that had to be made to benefit the team, and

understanding the beauty of the sport that I plan to pass on to the upcoming Great Oak varsity

runners. Of course I can’t leave out the adversities that I endured throughout my running career,

and there’s quite a few major ones too! During my freshmen year of spring track I got a stress

fracture on the inside of my right shin towards the middle of the season and I was in a boot for

about 3-4 months, basically that season was over for me. Junior year around the month of

October, my father was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and he passed away in December

due to a heart attack, which was probably the most merciful way for him to go in this situation.

In spring track of my junior year, I injured myself with Achilles-tendonitis on my right leg after

the Winter State meet and my season was over from the start. My current hobbies are running,

playing soccer, hanging out with friends, drawing, origami, crafts, photography, and writing in

my personal journals. My personality has been molded into someone who is inspiring, hard
working, sweet, shy, thoughtful, caring, understanding, serious, honest, and being a responsible

gentleman.

Throughout all four years of high school, I would say that AP Physics in Mrs. Draughon’s

class was my favorite class of all time. What really made me enjoy this class was the feeling of

getting a fresh start on a new subject for the entire class. What I mean by this is that there were

hardly any other students that were knowledgeable on the topic and this makes learning

something new fun for the whole class. Each person gets the opportunity to interpret their

understanding on what is given from the lesson, regardless of whether it was right or wrong, the

teacher will go through the thinking process and provide the proper method for understanding the

lesson. To make this even better, the class would often learn certain units through hands-on

experience and I very much enjoyed these activities. Many of those reasons being that you get to

physically observe the lab activity and you have to work with your peers to gain an

understanding about what is happening in the lab. Overall, taking AP Physics has not only

helped me tremendously in creating a better working habit for school but also for life and

learning how to work with different types of people when that will inevitably happen to me later

on in life.

After having endured 4 years of high school and looking back throughout the years of my

english classes, I enjoy writing on my own but I wouldn’t say that I am a better writer than I

thought I was as a freshmen. However, when it comes to writing, I am much quicker at finding

the needed information to what I actually want to write about and I am able to provide stronger

evidence to my statement. I still struggle, sometimes, when analyzing a given prompt and it is

my responsibility to find out what the author’s main idea is and what specific evidence I need to

find in order to support or go against the author’s claim. As a reader, I generally just don’t do as
much reading as I used to and there are very few books that I genuinely love to read. Although

recently, the book Into the Wild got me hooked to reading again for a short time. The story could

be somewhat relevant due to when it was first published and making connections between the

author and the protagonist of the book was very straightforward. If you’re wondering, yes I still

have my dream journal and I plan to focus on writing them a little more detailed so when I have

the chance to draw them they can closely resemble that of how I described it.