We go through life trying to meet a certain set of standards at all times. They can be social standards, educational standards, work standards, health standards, ect. These standards tend to dictate how we go through life and the choices we make. A lot of the time, if we don’t meet those standards, it can really make us feel like shit.
We have expectations to meet and by meeting those expectations we have the chances of advancing in our position. We want to be cool, we meet the expectations for what the ‘cool kids’ do. We want to get good grades, we meet the expectations set by our instructors.
It’s just the way it goes.
College is a different playing field. We had a taste of the competition and expectations in high school, but it gets amplified (major understatement) in college. Suddenly just meeting the expectations isn’t good enough. Suddenly, we need to be passing all expectations set for us to even start getting ahead.
There’s this idea of the perfect student who’s been into research since her first semester, who’s setting the curves if there was one. That kid probably sits a few seats away from you and it’s hard to not hate her. You know she works hard for what she has and you know she sacrificed a lot. But still. I mean how does she do it? Why can’t I do it?
It really eats into you and suddenly you’re trying your best to get on that same level. You try your hardest to find jobs, research, and volunteer opportunities. You watch twenty videos on how to study and you follow through with every single one of them. You reach out, you take risks, you work yourself to malnutrition and sleep deprivation.
You’re still not there.
It’s still not good enough.
At this point, you ask yourself how in the hell am I supposed to accomplish anything if even after I try my hardest, I end up in the same f*cking place?! What else is there that I can possibly do that I already haven’t done?!
It’s disheartening and it’s frustrating to the point where this realization is the one that puts a lot of kids over the edge of dropping out. I mean really. If you don’t break in college, you’ve found the secret to living a happy life and I would love to chat with you sometime because let me tell you, this shit is killing me.
At the same time, I shouldn’t be dramatic. This is something that the majority of people go through and clearly, the majority of people don’t end up dropping out. So why does it feel so impossible? Where am I supposed to go from here?
For me, sitting in class listening to people work out practice problems while I sit there having not the slightest idea how to start is one of my initial motivators. I mean I used to be the kid that was done with tomorrow’s homework at the beginning of today’s class. Did I miss a semester? Did the class just meet and go over how to do this without me?
I mean kids joke and exaggerate about how they’re totally going to fail the next exam and how they literally don’t know what’s going on. Yet they can do the homework and you can’t. Where does that put you?
I wish I could say something positive like “don’t compare yourselves to others” or “just try harder next time” except everyone knows that having that mentality only sets you up to be mediocre. And yeah, maybe the kid who’s found the secret to living a happy life follows these philosophies, and maybe it works for him. It's just that in my experience, trying to not care so much only predisposes you to giving up or failing out.
The worst part is that many people want to be the person that can do all of these things. They want to be the person that can put in the work and see results. But even after exhausting every resource and every bit of advice, there’s no apparent improvement. It seems like ultimately, we can’t be the people we wish we could be. That saying we were told as kids of ‘you can be anything you want to be’ was really just a cruel joke to make us think we could actually do something.
Well, here’s that transitional part where I come up with the solution for all of these depressing realizations and frustrating situations.
We just keep doing what we can.
It feels like it’s not doing anything and we can swear by our test scores progressively get worse that it’s just not working, but there’s nothing else we can do. At the end of the day, we are the people we are. Sometimes that means that we’re the person that is in the middle of the class. I mean, there is only one ‘top of the class’ student.
Accepting that brutal reality can be daunting, but it shouldn't be the end-all-be-all of our endeavours. This isn’t meant to be a “just give up because the world sucks”. This is meant to be a reality check that may or may not make you feel better about not being the best of the best or the ideal version of yourself you wish you were.
I think it's beneficial to see where we need to draw the line. I think it helps us decide what we should be putting our energy into so that we can just be the best versions of ourselves that we can be. We don’t fully realize how far that can get us despite not having the title of ‘number one’.
We don’t want anyone to say we didn’t try, and so we should keep continuing to try to reach our goals. We just shouldn’t be aiming to be the best of the best and then give up when we realize we can't always do that. We don't want to feel like failures, and by accepting that we can't always be the best, we find ways to still succeed.
It’s not giving up. It’s developing our ideas of success so that we don’t fall into a rut of feeling that we’re not good enough and that we should ultimately give up.
This is about acceptance without the surrendering. It’s about finding that middle of ‘be the best’ and ‘settle with what you already have’. One of the best things you can really do for yourself while going through college or even just life in general is to set realistic goals. Notice that this doesn’t mean just throwing in the towel, but it means feeling only enough pressure to do the best out of what’s possible given our situation.
