It wasn’t until I was studying for my second exam during my first year at Scripps that I realized I was smart. Even though I had straight A’s all through high school while taking the hardest classes offered and being involved in many extra curricular activities, I never really considered myself smart. There were always people who did better than me on tests and I felt as though I always had to work harder than my peers to achieve the same level of understanding of the material. That was often frustrating and I equated it with the fact that they were smarter than me because they didn’t have to work as hard to understand something.

What I have learned in college is that everyone has to work hard to achieve their academic goals, straight A’s are no longer a priority, and how someone else is doing in a class is completely irrelevant to your academic standing.

I now understand that being smart goes beyond just understanding something easily. Being smart is something that you have to work at, something that manifests itself differently in each and every student. For me, being smart means that I understand how I learn, and know that I will always figure out a way to understand the material by setting goals for myself and making a map to figure out how I can best reach them. Being smart isn’t something that you can ever really obtain. It’s something that you continually work towards, because it means that you are always working to better yourself. Being smart means that you can look at an unsatisfactory situation, assess it, and decide how you will proceed. It is with this mindset that I have learned to grow from experiences where I got a 62.5% on an exam and learned from my mistakes so that I could do better the next chance I got. In addition, I have been able to establish my strengths and weaknesses as a student. I know that I am more successful when I can speak with my professor about issues I am having or that I need to read my textbook for chemistry in order to solidify the topics we are learning about. Although I don’t often think of it this way, all these things make me smart. They show that I am willing to place blame on myself, but also be willing to acknowledge that I was correct in some areas and move forward with these ideas in place.

I think that I need to work on giving myself more credit. Oftentimes, I am likely to be too hard on myself, scolding myself for making a silly mistake or for getting a grade that I am not happy with. The truth is, this happens to everyone and the fact that I can realize that too also makes me pretty smart.

Sometimes, I still question my abilities when a professor calls our class smart, intelligent, creative, or any other adjectives related to our intellectual abilities, but what I am trying to do more and more is to embrace those compliments and give myself credit for the smarts I do possess, and even though my specific tools might seem different from others’, and I don’t have Unagi like Ross, I am reminding myself that they are still valid and make me smart in my own way.