The Best Academic Comebacks
My semester Grade Point Average (GPA) last semester was pretty low: 2.54.
It was a hard semester, in part because of some personal problems of a Telemundo scale that occurred to me in the summer and through the start of the semester, which I'm not at liberty to explain or detail.
Let's just say that it was so traumatic for me, I was basically experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as identified by my counsellor at International University Bremen (IUB): insomnia, fatigue, weird dreams, irritability, depression, inability to focus, i.e. I was turning into Woody Allen's characters.
It is one thing to know and anticipate PTSD, but a very different thing to actually undergo the emotional roller coaster, and to experience the brain freeze when placed under stressful situations (like exams, which had never happened before). Now that I have actually experienced this, I have a greater sympathy for veterans who freeze up from the minor stress of everyday life tasks, like counting their change with a line behind them.
In addition to that, there was the additional stress of getting used to the environment at Rice again, getting used to a new thing that I had never done before (full fledged research), and the pressure of finding a job, which was and is a full time job on its own.
All and all, it was a really bad semester, and all the stress really affected my grades and academic performance.
This semester, I took a pretty different approach. Firstly, I used my winter break to fully recover, emotionally. Like totally relax, and have fun.
I also resolved to take my final semester with a very different mental approach: I read John Eliot's "Overachievement" over the winter, and also resolved to take his class, Performance Psychology. I also read Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done", and put his method into use halfway through the semester. I chose courses mostly because of my interest in them, since I more or less fulfilled the requirements for my major, so there was performance psychology, new venture creation (on technology commercialization, taught by the Jones school of business), research ( a lot of it, because of my Honors research project), and a math course in Combinatorics.
The math course is not easy, and there are a lot of brillant folk in the class as well: as I didn't have as much time to devote to this course as I would ideally be able to, I took the course pass/fail.
Well, guess what? After a very fast and hectic semester, I just found out that except for New Ventures, the other grades are in, and I got a final semester GPA of 4.07 (out of a possible 4.0).
This pulls my overall GPA up from 3.33 to 3.47. When the New Ventures grade comes in (and I am pretty sure I got an A), it should pull up my grade further to 3.49, which makes me really happy.
---
Actually, the best academic comeback for me is probably my A levels, which are the end-of-high-school national examinations in Singapore, which determines where you go for your university. It basically determines (to some extent) the rest of your life.
Before we take the A levels, the school administers a pre-A level exam, which we call the Preliminary examinations. The standard is roughly identical with the actual A level standards, although my school was an elite school and liked to drive the screws into our heads with ridiculously hard (even by university-level courses) problems.
Even then, it was a pretty good indicator for actual A level performance.
I still remember how I passed my Junior College years: I was a complete slacker. Hardly did any work, especially for mathematics. I hardly even attended classes. In fact, the only math that I did the homework for was statistics, stuff like the Poisson distribution etc., and that was because the homework was easy. I was really lazy then, I hated working too hard.
Imagine my shock when my grades came in:
Economics B
Physics D
Chemistry C
Math O
General Paper A2 (Note: I actually do not remember my grade on this)
The O represents that it was an 'O' level pass. The 'O' Levels, for those who don't know, are British (and Commonwealth) standard exams like the 'A' levels, only that they are below the A levels in difficulty.
In all essence, I completely failed my Math. I won't deny that I totally deserved such a bad grade, but then something happened.
I still remember the rush of adrenalin, when I realized "I am in very deep s---", since I had slacked for two whole years: sleeping in class, skipping it sometimes, not handing in homeworks. In fact, in all our class tests, I had come in at the very bottom of the heap, because I didn't even bother. I actually got 5% on a test one time, because I scribbled something like "I did not study, I do not know" and went to sleep. On the test paper itself.
After the Prelim results came, I set to work.
And work, I did. I worked so hard, my parents completely stopped nagging me to study. In fact, at one point my mum actually came in to tell me to not work so hard ("it is ok if you don't do well, we know you are working really hard" and "we already have a crazy relative, I don't want my son to turn nuts as well")... I was my own slave driver, working easily anywhere from 12 to 18 hours a day, for two whole months. Every single day. I didn't give my self any slack on weekends. It was the same punishing routine, of which I still vaguely remember: I would do a math practice exam paper in the morning for three hours, after which over lunch I would do a physics, chemistry or economics practice paper while eating, take a 15 minute break for a nap, then do another math practice exam paper in the afternoon. Then in the evening I would use that time to revise either physics, chemistry or math until 11.30am, after which I would literally collapse into bed, only for the alarm to ring at 5.30am the next day for the cycle to repeat itself.
Whenever I was tired, I took micronaps of 10-15 minutes, a habit which I still do, and which served me well everywhere, especially in the Army. Then I woke up, and plunged back into work.
The A levels came, and went. I finished the exams, and with a huge feeling of relief, I went on a holiday to visit my sister in the USA in December 1999. After returning to Singapore, I entered the Army (Whiskey Company, Platoon 2, BMTC School 2).
We got a day's off from training to return to mainland Singapore, in order to get our results.
I still remember how my teacher, Mrs. Tam Beng Beng, broke the news to me:
"Peijing, -sigh-, only one B!!"
I literally broke out in cold sweat at the thought that all that hard work went to waste, and that I only got a B, and the rest were Cs and Ds. My hands were trembling as I received the results slip, which read:
Mathematics A
Physics A
Chemistry A
Economics B
General Paper A1
What she had meant (of course!) was that if I had gotten an A instead of that 1 B, I would have been a perfect scorer at the A levels.
But I was too happy to care anyway. I squeezed in two years' worth of mathematics into two months, and went from a fail to an A in the same time frame. So unlike a lot of other people, I'm actually proud of my A level results because I actually did work my bottom off for it.
It was a hard semester, in part because of some personal problems of a Telemundo scale that occurred to me in the summer and through the start of the semester, which I'm not at liberty to explain or detail.
Let's just say that it was so traumatic for me, I was basically experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as identified by my counsellor at International University Bremen (IUB): insomnia, fatigue, weird dreams, irritability, depression, inability to focus, i.e. I was turning into Woody Allen's characters.
It is one thing to know and anticipate PTSD, but a very different thing to actually undergo the emotional roller coaster, and to experience the brain freeze when placed under stressful situations (like exams, which had never happened before). Now that I have actually experienced this, I have a greater sympathy for veterans who freeze up from the minor stress of everyday life tasks, like counting their change with a line behind them.
In addition to that, there was the additional stress of getting used to the environment at Rice again, getting used to a new thing that I had never done before (full fledged research), and the pressure of finding a job, which was and is a full time job on its own.
All and all, it was a really bad semester, and all the stress really affected my grades and academic performance.
This semester, I took a pretty different approach. Firstly, I used my winter break to fully recover, emotionally. Like totally relax, and have fun.
I also resolved to take my final semester with a very different mental approach: I read John Eliot's "Overachievement" over the winter, and also resolved to take his class, Performance Psychology. I also read Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done", and put his method into use halfway through the semester. I chose courses mostly because of my interest in them, since I more or less fulfilled the requirements for my major, so there was performance psychology, new venture creation (on technology commercialization, taught by the Jones school of business), research ( a lot of it, because of my Honors research project), and a math course in Combinatorics.
The math course is not easy, and there are a lot of brillant folk in the class as well: as I didn't have as much time to devote to this course as I would ideally be able to, I took the course pass/fail.
Well, guess what? After a very fast and hectic semester, I just found out that except for New Ventures, the other grades are in, and I got a final semester GPA of 4.07 (out of a possible 4.0).
This pulls my overall GPA up from 3.33 to 3.47. When the New Ventures grade comes in (and I am pretty sure I got an A), it should pull up my grade further to 3.49, which makes me really happy.
---
Actually, the best academic comeback for me is probably my A levels, which are the end-of-high-school national examinations in Singapore, which determines where you go for your university. It basically determines (to some extent) the rest of your life.
Before we take the A levels, the school administers a pre-A level exam, which we call the Preliminary examinations. The standard is roughly identical with the actual A level standards, although my school was an elite school and liked to drive the screws into our heads with ridiculously hard (even by university-level courses) problems.
Even then, it was a pretty good indicator for actual A level performance.
I still remember how I passed my Junior College years: I was a complete slacker. Hardly did any work, especially for mathematics. I hardly even attended classes. In fact, the only math that I did the homework for was statistics, stuff like the Poisson distribution etc., and that was because the homework was easy. I was really lazy then, I hated working too hard.
Imagine my shock when my grades came in:
Economics B
Physics D
Chemistry C
Math O
General Paper A2 (Note: I actually do not remember my grade on this)
The O represents that it was an 'O' level pass. The 'O' Levels, for those who don't know, are British (and Commonwealth) standard exams like the 'A' levels, only that they are below the A levels in difficulty.
In all essence, I completely failed my Math. I won't deny that I totally deserved such a bad grade, but then something happened.
I still remember the rush of adrenalin, when I realized "I am in very deep s---", since I had slacked for two whole years: sleeping in class, skipping it sometimes, not handing in homeworks. In fact, in all our class tests, I had come in at the very bottom of the heap, because I didn't even bother. I actually got 5% on a test one time, because I scribbled something like "I did not study, I do not know" and went to sleep. On the test paper itself.
After the Prelim results came, I set to work.
And work, I did. I worked so hard, my parents completely stopped nagging me to study. In fact, at one point my mum actually came in to tell me to not work so hard ("it is ok if you don't do well, we know you are working really hard" and "we already have a crazy relative, I don't want my son to turn nuts as well")... I was my own slave driver, working easily anywhere from 12 to 18 hours a day, for two whole months. Every single day. I didn't give my self any slack on weekends. It was the same punishing routine, of which I still vaguely remember: I would do a math practice exam paper in the morning for three hours, after which over lunch I would do a physics, chemistry or economics practice paper while eating, take a 15 minute break for a nap, then do another math practice exam paper in the afternoon. Then in the evening I would use that time to revise either physics, chemistry or math until 11.30am, after which I would literally collapse into bed, only for the alarm to ring at 5.30am the next day for the cycle to repeat itself.
Whenever I was tired, I took micronaps of 10-15 minutes, a habit which I still do, and which served me well everywhere, especially in the Army. Then I woke up, and plunged back into work.
The A levels came, and went. I finished the exams, and with a huge feeling of relief, I went on a holiday to visit my sister in the USA in December 1999. After returning to Singapore, I entered the Army (Whiskey Company, Platoon 2, BMTC School 2).
We got a day's off from training to return to mainland Singapore, in order to get our results.
I still remember how my teacher, Mrs. Tam Beng Beng, broke the news to me:
"Peijing, -sigh-, only one B!!"
I literally broke out in cold sweat at the thought that all that hard work went to waste, and that I only got a B, and the rest were Cs and Ds. My hands were trembling as I received the results slip, which read:
Mathematics A
Physics A
Chemistry A
Economics B
General Paper A1
What she had meant (of course!) was that if I had gotten an A instead of that 1 B, I would have been a perfect scorer at the A levels.
But I was too happy to care anyway. I squeezed in two years' worth of mathematics into two months, and went from a fail to an A in the same time frame. So unlike a lot of other people, I'm actually proud of my A level results because I actually did work my bottom off for it.
posted by PJ at 3:34 PM
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