Midterm season. Also known as “Month of the Sweatpants.” Or “Period in Which Showers Are A Luxury that I Can’t Afford.” It’s a time when emotions are running high, when noses are running, and when the “work hard” part of Duke’s motto becomes apparent.
It’s also when many Duke freshmen experience academic failure. Sure, we’ve failed at certain sports, instruments, and even certain social situations. But many of us were used to being known as “the smart kids” in high school, the ones whose definition of failure was answering a question wrong in class.
Over and over again, people in our lives have told us that failure is something bad, something that must be avoided at all costs. That is, after all, part of the reason that we got into Duke University. We got A’s in our classes, we were captains of multiple varsity sports teams, we succeeded in building multimillion dollar empires by the time we turned 16, etc.
And then we got to Duke and went from being “the smart kid” to just “a normal kid.” This in itself is a huge blow to our confidence.
And then midterms roll around. Some students may have chosen classes in which the grade distribution is normal, so that the average grade is about a B. You, my friends, have been spared. The average on my first midterm was a 40%. Of course, this score was then curved, but the initial shock of seeing a number that would normally mean a C or a D was still soul crushing.
I suppose I’m lucky to have gone through my mid(term) life crisis early on in my college career. After going back to my room and staring blankly at the wall, wondering what I had done wrong, I realized something. I started to understand the importance of college as a transition from high school into the real world. Failure, rejection, and a severe lack of sleep are all real-life issues that I had never really experienced before.
People say that college is a bubble. But at least I can see some of what the real world has to offer through the transparency of that bubble.
High school for me was, on the other hand, a box. I was usually only exposed to success: getting A’s in my classes, participating in any of the clubs that I wanted to join, and winning competitions. Unfortunately, success in high school did not represent success in the college. I just hope that my actual midlife crisis down the road is this educational.