I shamelessly admit that I was one of the “smart kids” growing up. I was "that kid" who read dictionaries for fun and won spelling bees in elementary school. In high school, I took the most rigorous curriculum I could and had a GPA higher than the current balance in my checking account (#justcollegestudentthings). College admissions were a breeze; I padded my resume, got good scores on the ACT and SAT and off I merrily went to one of my top choice schools.
I thought I had my academic life together. I thought that spending my formative years in my natural state of having work from 30 AP classes in one hand and some form of caffeine in the other had prepared me to enter college and not crater so hard that dinosaurs would have been in serious danger were they still alive. Of course you can see where this is going — my first quarter of college hit me in my face like the proverbial ton of bricks. I spent my first two and a half months as a real life undergraduate student stress eating more than I care to admit and finding novel and inventive ways to procrastinate on feeling bad about my academic progress (hint: coloring books). Why did I meet this fate, you may ask? Because I was one of the smart kids.
Just to clarify, I’m not trying to humble-brag. I know it seems like I am. I know that talking about being intelligent and then talking about how being intelligent made my life suck definitely counts as a humble-brag. But the reality is that I know that I am not the only person out there in my position. I know that I am not the only student who went from breezing through with minimal effort during the most challenging courses their high school had to offer and being one of the smartest people in the room, regardless of the room, to cowering in the face of a student body, as if he or she was not any more intelligent than the group.
I know, I’m not the only person who made the transition from their early education to university with nary an idea how to study or be a responsible student, simply because studying was never a thing before the first day of college. For me, and a lot of other people I’m sure, holding myself accountable for my academic failures is a new and challenging thing — because before recently, I had never really been upset with where I was as a student or as a person. College messed with my head because for the first time in my life, I didn’t know what I was doing or who I was. I could no longer comfortably fit into the “effortlessly good student” label — for the first time in my life, I didn’t have everything together and I wasn’t "that kid."
I know I’m not the only person out there struggling with the impostor syndrome feeling that comes from being a golden child for the first 12 years of schooling until suddenly you’re a fish out of water in a pond of 23,000 over-achieving nerds (yes, UCSD student body, I am calling you out). So this is your reminder, if you’re one of those fish: you are not alone. It’s okay to not know what you’re doing for a little while. It’s OK to be clueless and scared and not be at the top of your class for a while. Complacency and defeat, on the other hand, are not OK — so once you’re done crying into your bowl of ice cream about your 2.7 GPA, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and go make yourself one of the smart kids again.
