Category: UIL

As the spring semester starts slow and shaky, the lure of mid-year exams and finals are still on people’s minds, not even to mention the added stress of other academic responsibilities. Whether that be UIL or just applying to different colleges and scholarships.

Junior class parliamentarian Dominique Brown is no stranger to this type of stress. Since around the second grade, she has been in UIL, only joining because coaches needed more people to participate in the spelling event. She decided to try out ready writing and journalism when she entered high school. “I’d say I’m pretty decent at it. There are things I can still improve on, but I still end up receiving 1st through 3rd place most of the time.” Brown said.

She says that while she will have to worry about writing college essays eventually, her experience from the events will help her format the papers properly. Writing those essays would become less complicated because she has already learned to make her writing fit well with each other. UIL meets naturally highly stressful. You have to sit in the same room with all the people who you’ll have to compete with. “The room is dead silent, so it’s you with all your thoughts, and it gets a little suffocating.”

To deal with this feeling, Brown says she’ll usually zone out and think about different books she has read in the past, thinking about whether she could use any of them as an example in her ready writing competition. During her journalism events, she’ll spend a little time staring at one specific word or sentence to see how she could change it to fit better with what she’s writing. But most importantly, she breathes calmly for a few minutes and then continues.

“I do feel like if I don’t do as good as I normally do, then I’ll disappoint myself,” Brown continued. “I tend to compare myself to past me and to others around me, so whenever I think I don’t do as good as how I’ve done before, I shut down and ‘face’ the truth. But then the results come back, and it’s not as bad as I made it out to be.”

To encourage others not to give in to this mindset, she says she’d tell others that their mistakes will not be the end of the world.

“They tried their best, and at the end of the day, their coaches are still proud of them for trying. It doesn’t determine whether or not you’re a failure.”