What Can the Challenges of University Teach You About Yourself
How can a B, B+, or even an A- on a quiz, paper or exam be so devastating? How can students who enter college with such excitement soon come to believe that the university doesn’t want them to succeed? And what is happening to the students who come to the conclusion that they don’t belong, that they are imposters whom the admissions office mistakenly admitted?
We want to explore why students level such harsh judgments against their universities and themselves at a deeper, existential level. So we begin with this question: Why would someone who receives a grade lower than desired, either blame their school, cut off a previous academic or life pursuit, or see their whole person as inadequate?
An obvious first step in answering that question is to say that students who struggle with these thoughts are getting some external messaging that tells them that. Perhaps it’s a less than desirable grade or the volume of work or simply the quality of the students around them or the fact that they’re working harder than they did in high school and getting worse grades. So it’s natural for them to conclude that something is wrong — either in themselves or the institution.
But then we must ask about this messaging: is it necessarily the case that that is what those events mean? This can’t be the case because other students who go through similar experiences react differently. While they may be temporarily disappointed with a “bad” grade, they eventually come to see it as simply an opportunity to consider making adjustments in their approach to academics like improving their learning strategies.
It appears, then, that we need to dig a little deeper.
Given that the external events don’t necessarily cause this reaction, it seems that the struggling students must be interpreting these events in such a way to cause these reactions.
But why interpret the events in this way? We suggest that it’s because the students need certain grades, or more broadly, need feedback from their environment that affirms that they are smart enough or good enough to be at school.
But why do students need this affirmation? First let’s look at the need for affirmation in general: approval from family, recognition from peers, accolades from school. Isn’t it the case that all of us need some sort of affirmation or some deep, lasting sense of meaning? And it seems pretty clear to us that this isn’t just any sort of need but an existential need we are always seeking. And if it is an ever-present pursuit, isn’t every decision, every thought, every moment somehow wrapped up in that struggle to find meaning and fulfillment. Our constant, fundamentally human need for meaning thus informs every choice we make, even in mundane circumstances.
The question then becomes HOW we are finding that sense of meaning and affirmation and how successful those pursuits are at giving us a true and lasting sense of fulfillment.
So let us return to our struggling students and let us remember that these students are at heart all about finding meaning and purpose in their choices, work and lives.
The problem of basing your self-worth on your external environment:
These students are finding their sense of self largely, if not entirely, in their external world. Whatever exertions they make must be affirmed by their external world, either by good grades, affirmation by friends, preceptors, professors, administration — whatever. Somehow they must get feedback that tells them they matter and that they belong.
So their need for fulfillment and affirmation creates expectations for the individuals and events they experience in their world. And when these expectations go unmet, it becomes an occasion for self-doubt and even self-censure.
So our three types of reactions now become much more understandable. If I am so dependent on my external world for affirmation and I’m not getting the positive feedback that I’m seeking externally, doesn’t it seem natural to react in one of these ways?
I can simply reject that University which is failing to affirm me and blame it for my struggles. IT is lacking, not ME.
or
I can try to minimize the severity of the feedback by cutting off that line of exertion. I say I used to be good at whatever subject but now that I’m not, it’s ok for me not to perform as well as before.
or
I can draw an even more desperate conclusion and see myself as an imposter who shouldn’t be here in the first place. And as an “imposter” I can expect to fail; it won’t be a surprise.
The tragedy of all three of these reactions is that while they may insulate students from a greater sense of failure and shame, they don’t allow their college years to be a time of exploration, growth, and development. They are more likely to disengage from university life, miss out on personally meaningful intellectual pursuits, and burn out physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
How to move towards a healthy mindset:
While understanding the root issues of these struggling students is helpful, we want to provide some way forward and out of this way of thinking. To do that, though, we have to avoid the rather pat and superficial answers you often get. It’s not enough, for example, to tell students to have a growth mindset when you don’t tell them WHY we have a fixed mindset in the first place and why it’s so hard to give up that mindset. If it was so easy to adopt a growth mindset, I think we’d all switch immediately…but we don’t. Why?
Well if you had invested almost all of your life finding meaning and purpose in a certain, largely external, way then it’s obviously hard to give it up.
Just think about this for a moment: you have spent most if not all of your life focused on performance and achievement, dependent on your context to provide the feedback you need. You see your friends and acquaintances doing the same, and, let’s be honest, it’s most likely the case that your parents and extended family have encouraged this behavior. The college admissions process certainly can.
It would be almost disrespectful of us to suggest so cavalierly that you simply need to change perspectives or “mindsets”. You are so invested in defining yourself in this way that it truly would be a herculean effort to change. Moreover, there’s a certain comfort in the familiarity of this way of being.
This leads to the next question of how can we ever get ourselves out of this struggle when the gap to a better way of being seems almost unbridgeable — especially during this particularly stressful time.
The first step is simply to awaken to this dynamic within ourselves, that we are creatures bound up in the quest to find meaning and fulfillment. We are often so focused on the business of the day and on the outside world and manipulating all the triggers we have to generate the feedback we need that we don’t realize what we’re doing. We simply are not fully aware of ourselves and our motivations.
Turn inwards. Introspect and consider what we are experiencing internally.
It is only when we become aware of ourselves in this manner that we can come to see the limitations of seeking our ultimate fulfillment solely through external achievements. And through our self-awareness, we can see and perhaps appreciate that the expectations we impose on the outside world, from our classes to our friends, are too high for what they can truly provide. For instance, grades and other achievements cannot ultimately make us “feel” smart in an enduring way (if they did, you’d feel that way already) and our GPA can’t address our sense of meaning or purpose or make us feel engaged, safe or that we ‘belong’.
And, more importantly, we can perhaps really question whether we want to define ourselves by our achievements, accolades, and recognition. Aren’t we worth more than that to ourselves?
Worldly success is not a bad thing, and it is not the case that we want you to stop caring about grades and your ambitions. Rather we hope that you give yourself more control over how you react to the vagaries of life, to the good and bad grades, to the triumphs and setbacks. A life more centered IN itself can at least allow and entertain other interpretations to the ups and downs, especially the downs, in life. Just think of the freedom there is in seeing a bad grade not as an automatic condemnation of yourself but as an opportunity for reflection, growth, and adaptation.
Your sense of self, your value to yourself is more than problem-sets, papers, midterm grades, or even the ups and downs of campus life. Our hope is that you’ll come to recognize these dynamics and appreciate yourself enough to see that. That, in a sense, is the first step from liberating yourself from the vagaries, and ultimately the lack of fulfillment of a life formed around extrinsic pursuits.
