What Will Smith and University taught me about faith

[jennifer_bloom]

My entire life I’ve pursued crazy dreams. In university, when I started third year with a 1.0 cumulative GPA, my goal was to go to Harvard. I ended up taking another 32 half year classes and raising my Cumulative GPA from a 1.0 to a 3.06 by getting straight A’s for 3 years in a row and tripling my course load in the last 3 years of school.

At that time, since I broke records with my academic performance (like the 98% I got in SA) while a perfect 4.0 is an 85%, I had two professors who were interested in taking me on as a grad student but I never got into Harvard. I had classes where my grade was 27% higher than the class average and I had 24-page essays where my grade was 40% higher than the class average.

I know that is meagre compared to my friends who got PhDs from Yale or Stanford or MBA’s from Wharton or E-MBA’s from Columbia, but it’s a start, and I’m still improving. I plan on getting a graduate degree one day, but the grad program I got accepted into was not something I enjoyed doing and I would like to pursue a different line of work later on.

Will Smith said in his book that when his father asked him to build a wall, his father always said, don’t look at the whole wall, look at the brick your laying today. It took him and his brother over a year to lay the wall and they did it one brick at a time. So when I approach other goals, I don’t think of the whole pie, I think of the bit my mouth is chewing and it’s okay if I don’t finish it in one day.

[Anonymous]

Dont compare yourself to others. Your life is different from theirs. Your paths are vastly different. Just because they got their PhDs from Yale and Stanford, does not mean that you cannot. Have some faith. You are extremely intelligent. Work hard, stay calm, study consistently.