Your first year of college can feel almost like a dream at times. From the independence to the partying to the new friends and everything in between, it can sometimes be easy to forget the actual classwork, but one thing that is sure to bring your attention back is your first bad grade! It suddenly feels more real, more serious than a bad grade in high school, but don’t panic, you are definitely going to get through it! Here is how to deal with your first bad grade in college!
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Don’t Beat Yourself up
The first thing to do it just take a breath and no get too down on yourself! Being at college is just like any other element of life. We have our good days and our bad days, so not every single assignment you ever send in is going to be top notch. Sometimes the subject just isn’t your thing, and you struggle. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad student overall.
Learning Experience
If there is a specific reason that the grade is bad, you partied too hard that month, you skipped more classes than you should have etc., then you need to take this grade as a learning moment and make sure that you get a better balance between playing and working next time around. We’re all allowed to make a mistake; it’s how we act to rectify the mistake that matters.
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Ask for Help
If your grade is bad because you are struggling to keep up with the pace of the class, then don’t be ashamed to ask for help from a tutor or a friend. Like I said, not every subject is for everyone, so you need to be brave enough to admit that you are having a tough time with something so that you can put the right support network in to place.
Motivation
Getting a bad grade sucks, doesn’t it? Well, what you now need to do is take that feeling of disappointment and shame, lock it up in one corner of your brain, and use it as memory motivation for all future assignments. If you don’t want to ever feel that way again, you know exactly what you have to do in order to prevent that!
Embrace Failure
Don’t think of failure as the thing that stops you in your tracks and makes you move on to something else. Think instead, of failure as the first obstacle in a much longer path, something that you need to embrace and come face to face with in order to get over and move forward. One bad grade shouldn’t be the end of your college enthusiasm, it should be something that you take and use as inspiration to better in the future.
