Some people believe that being academically successful is having straight A’s at the end of the semester, while others think success is passing with a C.
If people commit, it’s perfectly OK to have a B or a C at the end of the semester. Success is not defined by your grade point average. Every person in this world has a scholastic limit.
The fear of failure is engraved so deeply into students that when they get a C they feel like they have failed. It’s important to know that school is not about getting A’s. Sometimes you’ll learn more from that C than by acing every test.
I used to be the type of person who went the extra mile by doing extra credit or attending meetings after school. I was always looking for a way to create a safety net that would protect me in case I ever failed test.
But as I made the transition from community college to a four-year institution, I learned that people have different academic ceilings.
It seems as though getting a C in a class these days is the end of the world. But if you are confident that you gave 100% in that class all year long, then you should feel proud because nothing in life is a given. You earned that letter grade.
There’s one undeniable fact in life: some people are more talented than others, and that’s OK. Not everyone can play in the NBA right after high school, like LeBron James, and not everyone can become a billionaire at age 23, like Mark Zuckeberg.
The truth is that there are gifted people in this world that are capable of doing incredible things, and not everyone has that gift.
Throughout my years in high school, most of my professors and counselors would constantly tell me that in order to be accepted into a four-year university, we would need to have a GPA over 3.5. And if you were one of those over achievers, and were thinking of applying to UCLA, UC Berkeley or USC, your GPA should be over 4.0.
Students who attend UCLA have an average GPA of 4.29. Columbia University and Harvard have both GPA averages of over 4.10.
That means that students who attend these institutions took many advanced placement classes, and excelled at them.
Just because you can’t get straight A’s in a semester or don’t win personal awards, doesn’t mean that you don’t excel at something.
Besides being academically successful, people should also consider being successful in life, where there’s no teacher evaluating whether you did something right or wrong.
Being successful in life is much harder than excelling at school because in real life, there’s no extra credit or re-do. Once you make a mistake, it’s done. Also, I guarantee you that the lessons will stick much longer than those from your professor.