Going through pages was a tedious task for me as a kid. Attending to my assignments was never something I looked forward to either. I would rather sit in front of a television and watch my favourite shows for as long as I could back then. Consequentially, I was never the brightest student or anything close.
In junior secondary school, how I prepared for examinations and tests was so wrong. I would only wait, not just until the day of the examination but even two or three hours before. That is when I would begin my "la cram la pour."
"Business studies is the study of business, demand, and supply..." Only to forget so quickly what I had just memorised.
At some point, when I had only just started the first term in senior secondary school, I was going to change schools. It was abrupt. In a matter of days, I was preparing to transfer to the new school. What I didn't know for a while was that it was going to be a military school—a boy's only school, for that matter.
On the first day of school, I sat close to the back. I could see almost everyone. During the first class I experienced, I noticed something rather intriguing. When the teacher asked a question, there were usually many hands in the air. That was a lot more than I was used to seeing. And, unsurprisingly, my own hands weren't in the air. I didn't even understand what they were talking about.
When that term ended, I had the worst result that I had ever gotten in my life. I had so many reds. Wait. I meant that I had so many F9s: physics, chemistry, mathematics, geography, and further mathematics. It wasn't funny, and so I knew that I had to do something about it.
I enrolled in extra lessons with a couple of teachers for certain subjects, and then I hoped that things would get better. I wouldn't say that I was wrong for hoping, because the lessons actually helped me in some ways, but the improvement could have happened without the lessons. One faithful day, however, everything changed.
Fed up by my poor performance, despite all the extra money that she had to pay, my mother was going to revoke a lot of the privileges I was enjoying. Thinking about it all now, I don't think that she meant the words she said then. I mean, one of them was that she was going to take me out of school and leave me under the bridge to work. Either way, those words were effective. And that was in senior secondary school.
I started to work a little harder, develop a new and improved mindset, and stay more concentrated on school work. Fast forward to many years afterwards, when I was already at the university and scored really well in the external examinations I took.
That new behaviour I developed stuck with me, and so I continued being serious when I started out at the university I recently graduated from. In a matter of years, I went from being a really nonchalant student to one that graduated with solid results for the degree of B. Eng. Mechatronics Engineering.
With plans of going even further with my academics, I have it in mind to be diligent and hardworking, even more than I have ever been, so I can finish with a distinction. That's how much of a studious person I am now as a student.
This post was inspired by the [Hive Naija Weekly Prompts, Edition 33](@hive-naija/hive-naija-weekly-prompts-or-edition-33. Take a look and find gem topics you might be interested in.
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