Pan Yijia, Class 1, Senior 1, Shenzhen Foreign Languages School Instructed by Yang Suning On my first day at school, even long before the textbooks were handed out, I found a couple of my classmates bound to their seats doing exercise. Then, the biggest challenge as a freshman in the campus came along, which is dealing with peer pressure. What really caused the challenge is complex. The great diligence and excellence of my classmates are to be put on the top of the list. For the first week, whenever I came into the classroom, there were students studying with a rock-solid look on their faces. As soon as I saw this scene, anxiety and a sense of guilt struck me. Moreover, I have myself to blame. Having stayed in a most relaxing atmosphere for the whole junior life, I tended to let everything go in its natural course rather than take action to have things planned. The lack of the ability to manage my time well gave rise to anxiety frequently in the first week, preventing me from standing out. Thus, the challenge of dealing with peer pressure became an issue that needed to be handled urgently. To cope with the challenge, the very first thing I had to do was to build up a better self. For weeks I’d been trying to accelerate my speed of packing up so as to squeeze in more time for my studies. With the time saved, I was able to acquire more knowledge and complete more tasks. Learning from my excellent classmates helped me overcome the challenge as well. Recently, I’ve found that my classmates are extraordinarily kind, having a wide scope of knowledge in different fields. There are various things I’ve learned from them, such as determination, time management, being humble and so on. Through the two ways above, I tried to meet the challenge and managed to overcome it. The future path is still long and winding, yet I should not give up in the face of obstacles. I should take them as motivations, heading for a promising prospect. | 