So you were at the top of your class in high school. Your GPA was impressive, as was your resume of community services and extracurricular activities. Your SAT and ACT scores were through the roof. Your college essays had the admissions officers in the palm of your hand. You were never afraid of getting into college because you had been preparing for it from day one.
Then you got to college. And suddenly, you weren’t the “smart one” anymore. And that gave you a little bit of an identity crisis.
Trust me, I understand. While I was never the smartest student in my school, I ranked well among my peers. I graduated high school in the top 3% with a pretty high GPA. I knew that I had a long list of community service experience and extracurricular activities. Ever since 5th grade, I had been in gifted and advanced programs.
I was never “the smartest kid”, but my entire identity was based on being “intelligent.” A lot of who I was depended on numbers and rankings.
No one ever pressured me to earn good grades besides myself. I was, and still am, my harshest critic. I didn’t ever see myself as the pretty girl or the popular girl or the athletic girl. So that left me a limited number of options.
But in college, those numbers don’t matter anymore. Everything is different. No one cares what your class ranking was in high school. No one cares about your high school GPA or your SAT/ACT scores.
Your impressive numbers and resume don’t really matter anymore.
And this was really hard for me to accept. I had worked all my life to earn these scores. I dedicated so much time to making myself a strong candidate for universities. I didn’t want to let them go.
But trying to remain “the smart one” was taxing.
College is a huge adjustment. The kids at the top of their high school classes sometimes find themselves barely getting by their first year or so of college.
What makes this so difficult, is that those high-achieving students don’t know how to deal with “failure”. Failing a class doesn’t always have to be a “failure”. But for a student who is used to all A’s and B’s, it can be hard to accept anything less.
Once I realized I wasn’t doing as well as I did in high school and that things weren't as easy as they used to be, I started to become even more critical of myself. This stress along with my mental health and my struggle to adapt to college life sent me on a downward spiral.
I was floating by. My grades weren’t bad. But they weren’t where I was used to them being. And I felt like the biggest failure.
If I wasn’t smart, what was I?
What am I?
Realizing this gave me the power to expand into the full person that I am. College is so much different from high school. And even then, grades in college don’t necessarily reflect your intelligence. So the whole “smart one” thing is completely arbitrary and made up. These superlatives we come up with to give ourselves identity and purpose don’t mean anything to anyone else but ourselves. They say nothing about who we are. They stereotype us into this little groups that can prevent us from discovering all that makes up who we are.
As finals week approaches, remember that you don't have to be "the smart one". Because there will always be someone that is "smarter" or "more popular" or "more talented".
The best you can be is you. And that is always enough.
I’m not the smart one. Or the pretty one. Or the popular one.
And you don’t have to be either.
I’m just Katy. And that’s plenty.
