On Campus, Failure Is on the Syllabus

transfertobmc
Fri, 30 Jun 2017 03:28:49 +0000

Just because the article doesn’t say some of the quoted people are from low-income households doesn’t mean they aren’t. I know it may seem silly to freak out over B grades, but some people are conditioned to think this way by their parents or others. I think part of why one failure freaks people out so much is because they have specific goals and aspirations. If your goal is to get into an Ivy League, of course you’d freak out about a B. Messing up of step of your plans may make a difference between failing and succeeding and you really only have one shot in some cases.
I’ve always been the type of student who wants to be great at everything. My grades were great and I was MVP of the cross country and track team, etc. I loved running and my goal was to run really fast times and get recruited to a prestigious school with some athletic scholarship. When I got injured, it completely crushed me. I started having depression, my grades started slipping, and I just hit rock bottom because I didn’t know how to fail. My self-worth was tied into the things I thought I was good at. It took me a long time to develop a more healthy perspective. When you look at things from an outside perspective, it doesn’t seem like a big deal but there are so many internal things that are a factor.
Obviously, this is not a healthy mindset to have, we just need to look more deeply into the reasons behind these mindsets.

On a side note, funny I should see this because after a lot of different conflicts/dealing with failure, I’m transferring to Smith College to run XC and Track in the fall