When I came to Harvard, I was a little bit worried about my potential academic
performance. A lot of people warned me that maybe for the first time in my life
I would feel inadequate academically because I would be average or below
average in most if not all of my classes. And while I feel like this
hasn't been true in that I haven't felt inadequate when I've felt average and for
the most part I haven't felt average or below average, it's taken a lot of hard
work to be successful here. And I've put in that hard work, and it paid off and I
got a 4.0 last semester, but I consider this a little bit of a failure and I
want to tell you why.
I consider this a failure because while I was getting good grades I wasn't
pursuing anything that I was passionate about, or any of my avenues of growth. I
wasn't doing anything that helped me grow. I made the excuse that I was
just too busy with school and with extracurriculars but the reality of the
situation was I was spending hours a day on my phone on social media. Not even
that it was unproductive, it just wasn't giving me any value at all. I guess you
could say that I fall into the trap of living reactionarily which is that a
professor would assign a problem set and then I'd do that having set and then I
have another problem to do so I'd do that problem but I wasn't really proactively
pursuing anything it was all reactive it was here's something what are we gonna
do about it. And so I wasn't really doing anything you had with my own accord I
was just doing what other people told me to do and sure I was doing it well but
that's not really a good way to live life.
I guess one way to think about it is that I basically stop living my own life and I
just started living an average life of a Harvard student which is something that
I don't want to do. So yeah, when my grades came out I felt really successful.
I had a 4.0 at Harvard! But now in reflection I kind of see that that
4.0 is more indicative of how I just spend my life reacting.
I'm really trying to be proactive now I started to read a lot--I'm reading a book
a week so far this year and it's been amazing and I'm trying to make videos
again like this video because I feel like making videos is one of my passions
and I would be silly not to pursue it. And most importantly I'm just trying to
be aware of what I'm doing all the time I'm just trying to be mindful and I
think that's especially important in a place that is as beautiful as Harvard is. I
mean, this is such an incredible opportunity and I would feel so awful if
I look back on this in five years and realized that I just been reacting for
all four years. And so to that end I've also deleted social media and I've been
spending a lot less time on my phone as a result. And I mean I'm sure I'll get it
back but right now my relationship with it just isn't healthy and I feel like
that's just something that I gotta cut off and then maybe build a healthy
relationship with in a while. It's been crazy because I've just gotten hours
back in every single day and I've been able to put that to to passions and put
that to things that that I honestly love doing.
As I try to figure this out as I try to focus more on my passions and on the
things that helped me grow, sure, my GPA might drop a little bit. I might not have
a 4.0 for very long. But to be honest it's a lot less scary to me to consider
losing half a GPA point than it is to consider losing my passions entirely.