Describe EITHER an academic/extracurricular achievement OR a challenge that had a meaningful impact on you. What did it take to accomplish the achievement or overcome the challenge and what did you learn from that experience?

The Jewish Bar Mitzvah is a ceremony held to mark this transition of a 13 years old boy into adulthood. Usually, the boy would read a specific passage  from the Bible aloud in front of friends and family at a big party.

Last year, a few months before I turned 13, my parents and I decided to have a more meaningful journey

The journey started by talking about things that were important to me. Then I read the specific passage from the Bible, making note of things I thought were important and related to my life. I began making as many connections as I could between the passage to my life, highlighting the ones I thought were most important and related to me. I found similarities between the characters in the passage and me, and I wrote a speech about what I had found. I ended up presenting a 15 minutes speech about three major themes in the passage and how they reflected in my life, and how I share some of the characters’ traits.

I feel the critical thinking process I used in my Bar-Mitzvah journey gained me a lot more than I expected. I not only gained new knowledge, but also found meaning in what I did which then connected me back and allowed me to develop new perspectives of something I was sure I knew all about: Me. This process was so meaningful to me that I have been using it in many other projects since then.