This past semester, I lived through every college student's nightmare: I overslept for a final. At that moment, it was pretty damn terrifying; I had slept through a whole hour of my final when I woke up. And to top it all off, this was my toughest final, for hands-down the hardest class you could take at MUDEC. For just a moment, I was ready to just break down and start crying right then and there. But the moment was fleeting as I thought back to the other lows I have dealt with in my academic journey, and I decided that I wouldn't let this incident break me. I would turn this low-in-the-making into a story I would end up laughing about in no less than a week later.
And that is exactly what I did.
Never in my life have I jumped out of bed and gotten dressed faster than I did that morning, so you could only imagine how ~flawless~ I was looking. I would say that I "ran" to school, but in reality, I aggressively fast-walked to school (which I'm sure gave the Differdange locals a good laugh). I arrive at my final just twenty minutes after I woke up, with just forty minutes of the final to spare. My professor, who wasn't even mad, let alone phased that I am very much late hands me my exam, and you know what? I took one look at the exam and realized that even if I had arrived on time, it wouldn't have mattered: I would've been just as unprepared. And that made me feel a lot better, in a strange way. Luckily my professor, the kind soul that he is, gave me an extra thirty minutes to finish my exam, which only helped my chances so much, but hey, it didn't hurt.
I will never forget the look on everybody's faces when I had told them what had happened: sheer terror. They would all respond with: "Are you ok?" Maybe it was out of sheer exhaustion or delusion, but honestly, I was already laughing about it that same day, and with a smile on my face, I responded with a simple "Yeah, it's over now!"
A year or two ago, I would've thought that this incident would be the end-all to my academic career. That's the problem with college nowadays: we are programmed to think that mistakes are simply not allowed in order to achieve a perfect GPA. But we're only human, and it's naïve to think that mistakes won't happen during your college career. It may not be to the level of sleeping through half of your final, but mistakes at any level in college always tend to be blown out of proportion when you view them in the grand scheme of things.
If I have learned anything from this incident, as well as the others I have endured, it is that you must accept that it happened, accept the consequences, move on, and, most importantly, learn from the experience. Avoid the next mistake by studying harder, procrastinating less, talking to your professor sooner, or setting your alarm to a blaring volume that will not only wake you up but your neighbors too. And remember to never let the lows shake your confidence — because you are in college to do more than just earn grades and to be defined by GPA. You are here for the academic experience; you are here to gain knowledge that you will use for the rest of your life, regardless of the letter grade used to define how you obtained it.
