An Overachiever’s Emancipation

I walked slowly into the behemoth-sized, modern air-conditioned building with my parents. This is where it’s going to begin – course registration. I’ve worked hard to get here; this was it. “Hey! You’re an incoming student?” I nodded, as I was looking around at the hundreds of other students, seemingly being ushered around by other overly enthusiastic upper-year students. “Okay, be right back – just gotta get the name list,” he said as he disappeared into the crowd.

These were the big leagues. No more small towns for me – campus itself was a city all in itself! As excited as I was, I was also scared. I graduated from high school as the top student and made it here with the highest entrance scholarship there was.

“This is university,” we heard a representative in the room beside where we stood say on the microphone, addressing mainly parents. “In many cases, your children may be exposed to unprecedented liberty. This may be advantageous for the students, especially socially. However, nobody will force them to do their homework, assignments or studies. Nobody will remind them of their quizzes, tests, and examinations. As you can imagine, this independence may lead to academic difficulties.” He continued: “Your children may be, actually, certainly are, used to A or A+ averages – they wouldn’t be here if they weren’t. Despite this, every year most students’ averages drop, and statistically, 43% of our students experience a 16.4% drop in their grades; this is sometimes traumatic for them.”

I turned to my parents, surprised, as they listened on. “We know that as parents, you function as an integral component to their success and ...” It just became a blur after that. What?! Drop by 16 point what?! You’ve got to be kidding me. The upper-year student returned: “Alright, follow me! Just up these stairs ...”

This is how my career at university began: with fear. I had a lot to live up to, with a lot of weight on my shoulders. This was certainly not from my parents, since they never pressured me, but from myself. Throughout high school I was an overachiever. It didn’t really help that most of the other students around me claimed the same. It also didn’t help that a single class here accounted for at least the entire student body of my high school. For someone with this mindset, the plunge into university can be hard to absorb all at once. At this point it wasn’t really an issue of getting your mid to high-nineties, but a question of even getting above average!

It was with this that I began my journeys to the library. It was an act of necessity, really. The residence was quite literally impossible to study in, thanks to perpetual partying and never-ending noise. I remember the first time I went to the library on the second day of school, during orientation. Understandably, it was pretty empty, but I wanted to get a head start. Time was certainly not to be wasted now that I was in university. Then came assignments, tests, and exams. Every single half mark required my fullest effort, including the anxiety that came along with the slightest failure. 2 AM library adventures, constant undue stress, and a lack of most intrinsic happiness, all at the expense of any meaningful social fun: the experience of an inappropriate overachiever.

My extraordinary effort didn’t lack for results. In fact, it got results even better than high school. I realized, however, that the method of obtaining such results was counterproductive. I began to consider, though, questions of balance and cost-benefit ratio.

A simple look around me revealed that there were other extremes than mine: students always partying, not attending class, and living a life only afforded by way too much freedom. Really, I was no better, but was simply a student at the other extreme. What was needed was a fine balance, a middle ground that would result in a life outside of academics, but without putting success in the classroom on the backburner. For me, balance consisted of getting involved in volunteering, community work, and rediscovering passions in life, like dance.

Achieving balance is easy to urge yourself to do, harder to achieve. You can say it can't be done, but that's an excuse, a cop-out. A high-mark junkie like I was can be rehabilitated, but it would all have been easier to do if I'd realized the need for it at the beginning. For the record, balance doesn’t necessarily have to be incompatible with high grades – after all, I did manage to maintain the marks I'd had in high school.

But the incentive is simple: a true university life, with emphasis on the word life. Even though its achievement can sometimes require unexpected insights, that's something that everyone is entitled to.