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Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
I'd like to talk about my older sister, who works as a nurse in a fairly overstretched hospital and, on top of that, is currently studying part-time for a further qualification, which between them add up to what I'd genuinely call an exhausting existence. Her job itself involves rotating shifts, including plenty of nights, and the physical side of it — being on your feet for twelve hours, moving patients, running between wards — is something I don't think people fully appreciate unless they've actually done it. What strikes me about how she works isn't just the hours, though; it's that she brings the same level of care to a routine shift as she does to something genuinely urgent, never really cutting corners even when she's clearly running on very little sleep. She studies in whatever gaps are left, which sometimes means an hour before a night shift starts or on a day off that most people would just use to recover. What I've learned from watching her, more than anything, is that hard work isn't really about doing dramatic, visible things — it's mostly about showing up properly, again and again, on the days when nobody's watching and it would be easy to do slightly less. I complain about my own workload more than I probably should, and thinking about her tends to put that complaining into perspective fairly quickly.