And the Results are In...

Yesterday my grades for this past term at university were released. As I clicked the link to take me to the online report, I experienced something I had never experienced before when checking my grades - a slight tinge of nervousness.

This term was entirely uncharted territory, in that I had struggled in several courses. I've never struggled in anything academic before. This was especially true in my Music History class (which attempts to condense several millenia of history into 4 months of coursework). Some people who had already taken the class called it "easy marks". Others were less optimistic. Looking back, the latter group was right.

Not only was the course difficult, but it offered yet another new experience for me. I totally bombed the final exam. I have never done that before either. I had intentions of studying vigourously, acing the final and getting stellar final marks in the course despite my early struggles. Somehow, and I'm not quite sure how it happened, I ended up staying up almost the whole night right before the exam trying to cram, wrote the thing while operating on 2 hours sleep and a cup of coffee, and finally made a glum calculation of a final score of 60%. A pass, yes, but I've never been content with just passing.

Perhaps this is a humility lesson for me - a chance to further distance myself from my default mode of the fear of failure, and perfectionism which refuses to settle for being second best. Dealing with failure is probably something God has to work on the most with me. On the other hand, I've heard from some people that the second year of university is always the hardest, so perhaps I'm a helpless victim of circumstance. In any case, I didn't have the greatest term, but there's nothing I can do about it now.

Actually not all my marks were bad. I rattled off A's in Choir and Aural Skills (a class on sight reading music), and I was pleasantly surprised to see an A- for my Voice mark. I had received a good mark last term, but this term I had felt sick or tired most of the time, and I hadn't expected to be marked so generously.

So it wasn't a model term, but I did learn some valuable lessons, and I'm ready to move on.