High school was relatively easy for me. I thought I was pretty stressed and that I studied hard, but the truth is that I didn’t really know what being truly stressed about schoolwork or putting my all into studying felt like until my first semester of college. Going from a public high school to a highly acclaimed private university changed this, of course.
I had been told that college would be harder, more, worse, etc. in terms of the material and the work and course-load and I had accepted that, but of course I didn’t really know what to expect. In high school I had always been the smart kid, the one who got things easily and didn’t have to study for a quiz or test to do at least okay. For most of my high school career, I got by doing little work with little difficulty, and at the time I could see no problem with not putting all of my effort into school. But when my first semester of college rolled around and I did poorly on my first neuroscience test (so poorly that I was embarrassed to tell my mom and friends or even face my professor), I had no idea how to cope.
I freaked out. I had never failed a test before. My responses ranged from crying to calling my mom asking if I could withdraw to hiding away in my room in self-loathing. And though I would never want to relive that experience — the shame, embarrassment, and hate that I put on myself — I’m glad that I got it out of the way, and I wished it had happened sooner. Because I had never had any failure similar to that in high school, I had no idea what to do. It affected my work in other classes and made me question whether I even belonged at the school I attend.
Now I see the real problem with how easy it was for me in high school: I had never failed. I didn’t know how to recover or how to cope with not doing well in a class, and it made the later failure that much harder to deal with. It would have been easier to cope with my failure — or avoid it entirely — if I had dealt with it in the past.
Coasting through high school was not beneficial for me in the long run. I didn’t really know how to study or recover from not doing well, and I wish I had been challenged more in the past in order to gain the experience that would have made the adjustment to college so much easier. From that experience, and many others since then, I have learned not to fear failure. It may sound cliché, and maybe it is, but facing that failure made me grow as a student and as a person in general. Failure is inevitable, no matter who you are, and facing it sooner means learning from it and learning how to recover sooner, which will only help in the future.
