THE FEAR OF FEAR: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF DEFEAT
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Two days ago, the result of my last semester exams got released. It was quite sudden but I was expecting it. I knew it’d show it’s face one of these days. Just as I’d calculated, I really didn’t do well.
I’ve spent four semesters in my school, and this is the lowest GPA I’ve ever had by a very significant amount.
In this post, I’ll be talking about what I think I did wrong, what I could’ve done better and what I’d start doing moving forward.
I didn’t want to write this at first – it’s never easy discussing about one’s failure, but I thought about how sharing my mistakes might help someone that’s currently on that path make the right decision (at least what I think the right decision should be).
So, I’m no genius, but when it comes to academics, I fair quite well. For the first two semesters of university life, I kept up my track record and then, COVID happened. I still feel those months of being confined to just one space did something to me – I’m yet to figure out what it is.
After COVID subsided a bit, we were asked to resume, but virtually. That meant all of our classes would be taken online. Like every semester, I started with optimism even though for me and thousands of other students, this was an uncharted territory.
My school made use of the google classroom platform to conduct lectures. At first, everything was going fine, but as time went by, it became more difficult to keep up. The huge data charges I had to cough out from my tiny allowance, lecturers sending videos with large file sizes, being unable to eat good food… it just seemed as if the whole world was against me.
I struggled hard to read my notes and struggled harder to understand them – something that hasn’t really happened to me in a long time. When the results came out… well, when the results came out, It wasn’t that bad.
Second semester came fast. Faster than I imagined. It was pretty much under the same conditions as the first, except this time I really didn’t care that much as I used to. I had given the middle finger to my grades, damning the consequences. The whole school administration could go to hell and I wouldn’t even flinch. At this point, I had given up.
I stopped downloading the lecture videos and started investing more on things that went straight into my stomach – those ones won’t cause a person to feel inadequate or depressed.
A month after the exams ended, the results were released. This one was even more worse than the first, but this time, I was expecting it. I had spent the whole semester doing everything but care about my grades, so I wasn’t that surprised. I got scared of failing so much that I actually ended up failing.
After exams ended, things started getting better, I started feeling motivated to focus more on my studies, and I hope I stay like this when the new session resumes.
Now moving on to why I think I failed last semester…
After thinking about it carefully, I think the major reason this happened is because I forgot the reason why I chose my course of study. I chose my course, Mechatronics engineering, because I wanted to develop innovative ideas to help my immediate community. I chose it because of it “awemazing” prospects. I chose it because it’s the future. More importantly, I chose it to give myself a better future. And even though achieving these goals isn’t entirely dependent on having good grades, they might help ease the process.
Moving forward, I have resolved in my mind to remind myself of these goals whenever I feel down or too tired to go on with this journey I can’t back out from.
I hope someone that’s currently in a dark place that I was back then, will read this and get motivated. When everything starts seeming tough, try to think about the reason you started it in the first place. Let that be your motivation, let it drive you until you achieve your goals. Remember, it’s only over when you give up. And as my folks in this part of the world say – “Na who give up, fuck up”.
Do you have other ways of staying motivated when you’re feeling down? Please do well to share it in the comment box.
Thank you very much for reading this. Gracias!
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Smiles, this is quite similar to my last post. I mentioned the same quote, na who give up, fuck up.
Bro, I feel your pain even much more than you do. My first semester grade was poor and it pained me. I really wanted to cry then the second semester came and it was poorer. I was like what is going on. I got lost in thoughts for days thinking deeply.
The conditions we all were in when we took the exams were not nice at all hence the reason for the low performance.
Moving into this new phase, I believe we'll perform better.
Definitely, we would perform better.. thanks brother.
There were many late nights where I would fall asleep at my laptop, but some Mountain Dew helped keep me awake to complete those assignments. That thousand bucks was too good to pass up, so I just kept going in order to finish the race.
Glad to see you're learning engineering, as we have a huge shortage of them here in the US for some reason and I don't know why. There are jobs everywhere in the field, but we're just not producing the number that we need. Canada and the UK have the same problem as well. It's a mystery to me as to why.
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I'm glad to hear that your efforts later paid off. Perhaps I would've performed better if I had that kind of prize before me. 😅
Too bad we can no longer get Mountain dew in this part of the world. I've been making do with caffeine(which I don't like that much).
It's quite funny because the exact opposite is happening here in Nigeria - there are lots of brilliant engineering graduates but no jobs for them. Maybe it's time for them to start looking beyond local options.
And the courses you took, were they engineering related?
If I had to guess why there's a shortage of engineers, I'd say the field is seen as something your grandfather took ages ago, so the youth generation has no interest in it at all.
Even with the 1K award, I almost gave up as the workload was insane. The instructors pick over every little thing, so much so that I had to remind them that we are human beings and not machines, and they needed to chill out.
It's quite unfortunate that the government over here isn't making relocating abroad easy for them. I think they're afraid of a brain drain(which is starting to seem inevitable at this point). Also, many of the graduates cannot afford the cost of relocating overseas while some are not equipped with enough information to help them go about the stringent visa conditions. I personally see these as limitations though. And I know that limitations are there so as to be surmounted by us.
Majority of the non-educated folks who manage to get there do so through illegal measures. I really hope they come to their senses and realize that they're creating a bad name for their home country.
Perhaps the engineering field in your country needs a rebrand and better PR so as to attract youths to join the industry.
I can relate. The situation is no better over here. In fact I can say it might be a bit worse. At times, we get as much as 12 courses per semester and the lecturers don't go easy on us at all. The pressure is sometimes too much, but we still manage to handle it.