Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles 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 problem 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 out of 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.
A2 US harvard gpa average wasn failure felt Why My 4.0 at Harvard Was a Failure 7508 404 Priscilla posted on 2018/09/04 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary