Thank You Professor! by Ellen

Thank You Professor! by Ellen - August 2014 Scholarship Essay

We all stared at the bell curve projected onto the board. “The mean on the prelim was a sixty-three percent,” my professor announced. Even as I heard this news, I was hypnotizing myself—not sixty-three, not sixty-three, not sixty-three. After lecture ended, the students charged down the stairs to receive our exams from the TAs. When I finally got mine, I couldn’t move for a whole minute because I was so astounded. People kept bumping into me, trying to get to their next class, but I was too busy boring a hole onto my exam to try to change the score by the sheer force of will. Unfortunately, the number remained the same.

F.I.F.T.Y.N.I.N.E. I had scored a fifty-nine. And then I realized that I had scored below the mean. As tacky as it may sound, it felt like my world had ended.

For a few days, all I did was mope around and gorge on all the junk food that was abundant on campus. But classes still continued, and I noticed myself nodding off during lecture, as if the professor was singing a lullaby. And the shame I felt from my utter failure transformed into grit and perseverance. I started bringing gum to lecture, to force myself to stay conscious so that I wouldn’t be learning straight from the incredibly dry textbook. When I started falling asleep with gum in my mouth, I would buy expresso shots right before lecture and drink one right as class started. However, it was like my dopamine receptors were desensitized to caffeine and even double shots didn’t work.

Desperate to stay awake, I sat in the completely vacant first row, directly in front of the professor’s podium. Amazingly, I stayed awake the whole entire lecture. For the rest of the semester, I sat right in front of the professor, and he even started to make small talk with me after lecture started. Because of the failure that was tantamount to my career plummeting to the abyss, I learned to sit in the dreaded first row and even became friendly with the professor. And the next exam, I scored above the mean. Thank you, professor, for teaching me how to stay awake in class!