Anyone who has heard my name or knows of me will say that I’m “smart”. “You will get in anywhere” or “You are one of the smartest people I know” are phrases I hear every day, and every time I hear someone say it, I break into laughter. First off, I am not smart, I am far from it. Nobody sees it, but I am the student that goes to tutoring every day and every lunch period. I always had to work for my grade, and almost all of the time it felt like I was working harder than everyone else and still doing not improving.
While I may not be book-smart, valedictorian, or have an above 100 average, I am driven, passionate, and strategic, all skills that aren’t taught in school. For me that was always the problem with school, I saw enough professionals and attended enough conferences to understand that the skills that lead to success are never taught in school. School was always a place that taught complacency, that taught us to blindly do as we are told. In return, we are given a metric system that determines our value: grades.
Coming to Tech, I knew I had huge dreams. I saw myself as the next Mark Zuckerberg and I knew I could get there, but I knew grades were not the way for me. Grades and numbers (specialized test scores) would get me into college and a comfy job at Goldman Sachs or somewhere else just as nice. But at what cost? For all the time and effort I would invest in getting that perfect grade on a project or studying for hours to get that high 90, I could be at an event meeting my next business partner or a future employer or, better yet, learning how to network, pitch, and communicate. With the time I focus on raising my grades from 95’s to 99’s I could be doing so much more.
The smartest thing I ever did is completely throw myself into my passions. I took every opportunity to explore every interest I had from designing to business planning to engineering. In the process, I developed my own metric system, one not based on numbers, one that focuses on my growth and achievements. My value doesn’t come from my grades, it comes from the real-world skills that I took the time to develop over the years. Your’s should too. You should find your own metric system, explore your passions, and grow professionally. Ask yourself to what extent does that 99 or 103 matter to me? Would I be happy with getting 90s or 85s for the freedom and time to explore opportunities? You need to assess your values, understand what you want to do, and do it in a way that your comfortable. That realization and assessment of my values is what I attribute all of my success to.
Written by Karina Popovich, Dyson Cornell '23
Instagram: karina.popovich
Photographed by Ayman Siam
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