Literary Contest Reflection

Are you telling me you entered a literary contest?

            A few weeks ago, for our Advanced English class, the professor asked us to enter a local literary contest in our university. We had to compete in one (or more) of three categories: essay, short story and poetry. As for myself, I chose to write poetry because it usually comes to me and is easier to write about. Anyways, in our classroom almost everyone belongs to an engineering major so we were not really expecting any winners because well, engineers are not best known for writing poems (or whatever). We submitted our works on time and practically forgot about the assignment. It was not until some weeks later that we received the news that three of our classmates won something in the literary contest and we had to go to the awards ceremony. The winners were Neythan, Luis and Angel, all three of them in the category of poetry, two of them engineering students.

            I have to admit, the awards ceremony was more than I expected. It even had a cool host, who received my most sincere applause. He did a wonderful job and actually made me laugh. Also, the ceremony was dedicated to Mark Weakander, a former colleague of some of the professors that hosted the contest and there we listened to some of the guy’s poems and, at least for what I saw and heard of him, I believe he was quite an extraordinary human being. Somehow, how they spoke of this person woke up the writer that lived inside me and made me like it a little more. Anyways, it was great to be able to see our classmates get their prizes and I definitely cannot argue about the food that we were given after the ceremony.

            Last, but not least, and going back to the poem, the fact that this poem was intended to be entered in a contest, made me work harder for it. Anyways, although I was being competitive, I still enjoyed writing my poem because I realized how beautiful it was when the muse came to me and how words flowed so easily. Obviously I cannot ignore the parts that I could spend a half hour writing nothing at all (no, I was not procrastinating), but at the end let’s say it was worth it. In conclusion, entering the literary contest was not that bad. Somehow, this is a new experience that can help us in our future lives and expands our knowledge so it can be a little more universal. After all, as Albert Einstein said: “Once you stop learning, you start dying”.