My Academic Achievement

One thing happened to me in college that I never saw coming, and it rearranged how I think to this day. It started when I accepted a place at one of the more respected universities back home in India. I had just finished high school, still riding the high of my results, when I found myself walking through freshman orientation.

August 23 was the date I set foot on campus for the first time, Student ID in hand, lost in a crowd of new faces and professors. My first class followed soon after. I was taking everything in, and like most guys my age I spent a fair amount of that hour admiring the women in the room instead of following the lecture. So I got caught off guard when the professor called on me by name and asked me to summarize the material for everyone. I told him flat out that I hadn't been listening and had no answer. He scolded me for it. I shrugged it off. The second the lecture ended I went right back to wandering around, soaking up the new place. That tells you roughly how much I cared about anything then.

The days rolled by and I collected friends easily, two of whom became my closest. The three of us did everything together: skipping classes, catching movies, killing afternoons at the pool table. That was the rhythm for months. Then the end-of-semester exams appeared on the horizon and the whole student body snapped into study mode. When my friends and I finally talked about the exams, the conversation went nowhere useful. We decided studying was pointless anyway. I took comfort in not failing alone. Low marks felt fine to me as long as the three of us shared them. It's an easy trap, caring only about the friendship when the friends are always around.

Our first exam arrived. I had done nothing to get ready, and sitting there I kept replaying the films we'd watched and the games we'd played while everyone else cracked open their books. That morning other students stood around quizzing each other on the topics. My friends and I laughed about having slept straight through the night without opening a single page. We were proud of ourselves, proud of the shared attitude.

Exam week ended. I didn't put down one correct answer in any of my booklets. When the results came back I had failed, and both of my closest friends had passed with solid marks. The shock of being the only one to fail knocked the wind out of me. I asked them how they'd pulled it off without studying. They told me the whole no-studying act had been a joke, and that the failure was mine to own for never taking my work seriously. I carried that bitterness home. Every harmless question from my parents set me off.

Then a different thought took hold: I could undo this. I had been one of the top students all through high school, so I knew what doing well actually required. I went back to college and threw myself at the books, studying twice as hard as before, days and nights of it. Whenever anger or gloom crept in, I told myself the answer was simple. Get up and study. The goal was to turn my results around, and I did. By the close of the first and second semesters I had climbed into the top percentile at the university.

That's how I got where I wanted to be, and the whole episode shaped the way I understand focus and performance now. So if any student happens to read this: come ready to work. Study. Concentrate. Keep play in its place and stay balanced. It's your life.