That was a long 4 years...
Well, I did it. I finally graduated from university! To say it was a struggle would be an understatement. I faced a lot of challenges - fell down a few times, got back up, got knocked down again, and got back up again. But I'm grateful for the experiences, both bad and good, I do believe that I came out stronger.
Before coming to NUS, I was actually enrolled in the University of Michigan - Shanghai Jiaotong University Joint Institute for a year studying Electrical and Computer Engineering. I did pretty well there, ranking 3rd overall in my batch of around 250 students. It definitely wasn't an easy feat and some of the coursework was challenging, but the bell-curve was favourable to me. Yet, my academic victory would be short-lived as I decided to drop out and start over at NUS to study Computer Science because of the COVID-19 situation at the time.
NUS was a shocker. My naive self thought that I would do well here too. So I didn't change my habits from high school or previous university. I played a lot of League of Legends and usually only started studying a day or two before exams. "The bell-curve will probably save me," I thought after midterms. The bell-curve. Did. Not. Save. Me.
At least for my introductory programming course, CS1101S, I was horrible. I regularly was on the wrong side of the bell-curve. Luckily, since I had a solid-ish math foundation, my other courses were somewhat okay. But programming really was the bane of my existence. I started to get more and more demoralized after realizing I was just bad at it.
Trying to do better
After the semester was over, I contacted my professor to ask for advice on how to improve. He agreed to have a Zoom meeting with me to discuss my peformance. Looking at my midterm score and final exam score, he asked me how I was doing in my other courses. I said they were a lot better. He then looked at me and said, "Look, you might fail this course. I would advise you to potentially look to transfer to another major - perhaps Information Systems or Mathematics?" I stared at him in shock, thanked him for his brutal honesty, and the call ended shortly after.
That day was the first and only time I cried in university. For the first time in a long time, I just sucked. I was no longer the guy who could always perform well. I thought about what the professor said, and originally was thinking of transferring to Computer Engineering or Data Science. But deep down I didn't want to back down from the challenge, and I wanted to prove him wrong. So I did.
Next semester was better, but nothing too spectacular. My weaker fundamentals still showed and while I didn't do horribly, my performance was nothing to brag about. Still, I was getting better. But I did realize that I would have to expand myself. I'm not the best person academically, so I needed to find other things I liked and would be good at. So I joined a bunch of extracurriculars over the next few years and got into Vice President roles at NUS Entrepreneurship Society and Google Developer Group @ NUS. I got better at communication and was excited about entrepreneurship, and was eventually accepted into the NUS Overseas Colleges programme to do an internship in Norway while taking entrepreneurship classes.
Somewhere along this timeline, I started to really like machine learning. In fact, these courses usually helped me to pull up my GPA. So in my final year, I started taking more of these machine learning and statistics classes that I enjoy. And I improved a lot. It wasn't easy though. In my final year, I was balancing between overloading courses, being a teaching assistant, serving as a resident assistant, being the Vice President at GDG @ NUS, writing my thesis, and looking for jobs.
But thankfully, at least academically, I proved that first professor wrong. I graduated with Honours (Highest Distinction) with minors in Statistics and Entrepreneurship. And along the way I learned a lot about resillience and perseverence. Life may not always be smooth sailing, but the storm makes the man.