I used to be a hopeless undergraduate student. I would have never dreamt of becoming a researcher or a lecturer. By taking a step back into the past, one can see how my marks were mediocre. In the third year of undergraduate studies, I lagged considerably behind the schedule, and I was far from finishing.
What was the matter? I didn’t consider myself dull or slow. On the contrary, I grasped concepts fairly easily, and I enjoyed many lectures. Sometimes I was sitting in the rear among the less interested part of the audience, sharing their boredom and dejection. Other times though, I advanced to the first rows, and stuck around the small group of outstanding students, those handful over hundred, admired and even feared by the others for their unmatched brightness and sharpness. I liked them. They were enthusiastic about what they heard at the lectures, and used to discuss the topics at length in the corridors, at pubs, at home. They were indefatigable workers. Boredom never touched them. They saw opportunities everywhere. They discussed the power of ideas or how to start a company. When spending time with them, I liked the intellectual challenges that presented continuously, I shared their enthusiasm.
It all seemed fine, but when it came to take exams, all that could go wrong, went wrong. On the exam days, professors and assistants turned into evil, sneering enemies. I perceived hostility. I struggled, I felt ashamed and shy. I might have experienced once or twice that bold optimism that leads one to walk upright into the exam room, grab the exam sheet and fill in the answers with conceited nonchalance. Most of the time I felt uncomfortable, insecure, and lacking confidence. Often there were some topics I did not master, and I was in a fearful hope that those topics would not appear in the exam. At first I had some good marks, but immediately I found myself in disagreement with the assessments. Some marks deluded me deeply. I thought they were nearly random, and depended entirely on which teaching assistant would examine the candidate. I soon got the idea that good marks were not obtained by knowledge in the field, but by perseverance in discovering the tricks and the ways of the professors. I started believing less and less in both my skills and in the value of marks. Why should I have complied with a system that judges and classifies students on criteria I despised? Unfortunately for me, the less I believed in the system, the harder it was to study, to concentrate, to learn and eventually to obtain good marks. I noticed soon that I was being dragged into a vicious cycle. I determined to shake it off for my own interest, but no matter how much rational effort I would put in my studies, my subconscious would not believe my effort. I could learn little, my attention drifted away continuously, and marks were plunging lower and lower each term.
With time, as I lost confidence and enthusiasm, my marks became lower and lower
Initially I was struck by how unfair (in my judgement) were my marks. With time, as I studied less and less, I became convinced I actually deserved low marks
Was is all gloomy and sad? Not all. In that period, when I had no faith in the university, I cultivated a number of other interests. I started playing guitar and improved very quickly. I even made new friends among professional musicians, spent hours in recording studios. I took up the hobby of photography. I read a lot, and wrote poems which I would share with equally minded young “artists”. Without being fully aware, my desire for success and appreciation was causing a change in my interests that shifted further and further away from my university courses. Whereas university would give me a feeling of inadequacy and oppression, my hobbies gave me satisfaction.
Yet, my attempts to find an escape in hobbies were clumsy. I was not a musician, nor a photographer or a poet. I was simply a student who, as many other classmates back then, had been demoralised and inhibited. I take the chance here to say a word to all those students that have felt like me: whoever treats us with scorn or expresses judgements on our work with disdain and derision, as it happened many times during my undergraduate studies, fail miserably in their task. Whilst their mission should be to stimulate the intelligence and desire of knowledge of all students, they instil insecurity and dislike for their subjects. My guilt was that of not belonging to that five percent of smartest minds. I did not shine, and I was unhappy.
