October of my Junior year, my English teacher explained to us the purpose of our

research paper and why it is significant that we chose a topic we are passionate about. She gave

us about a week to pick a topic and that had to be one of the hardest weeks of my life. I never

really considered what I was passionate about until that the week. I bounced around from topic to

topic, and finally reached a decision after having a very heated debate about minorities and how

they are represented in the media.

When my teacher initially introduced my class to the research paper and she explained

that it had to be 6 to 8 pages, I thought to myself there is no way. I could not understand how I

would be able to write about this topic without repeating the same thoughts and expect it to be

the minimum of 6 pages, I just did not see it happening. But it did. I had to overcome the fear of

writing the research paper, a fear that all high schoolers experience. While writing this paper, I

actually had to do thorough research and cite the sources I used. It wasnt something I was used

to doing and I did. Writing that paper was an obstacle itself, and it was not easy but overall it was

a very interesting experience.

During the course of writing that paper I learned what it meant to persevere. There was a

lot of times where I wanted to give up and not write the paper but I did not. I stayed up to dawn

one night putting the final touches on my paper. I remember being frustrated as a result of not

knowing what else to write about or being upset because it was 11:30 pm and the deadline was

12:oo am. The most important thing I learned while this paper was time management. I had to

cut back the time I spent talking to my friends and being on social media to conducting research

for my paper. I learned how to divide my time, so that in the future I would not be up from

sunrise to sunset writing this paper. This paper gave me a peek into what I should expect in

college.
 Overall my experience with writing the research paper was very interesting out of all

things but there are a lot of things, I would have completed different. For instance I would not

procrastinate in the future as much as I did for this paper. I would have used the resources that

were available to me, mainly my teachers. For future reference I plan to take advantage to the

resources that are around me whenever I am stuck or uncertain.