Maddison's Musings

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As I finish my second year of university, I've come to a slightly dramatic conclusion: I know nothing. While this is probably just me being dramatic, I don't know. Sometimes I really just feel like I've been scamming the education system for the past 15 years. Like sure, I do my homework (at the last minute), but I don't really study or actively try to retain any information, yet I do well in school? Honestly, this isn't supposed to be a brag at all, I'm just generally confused as to how this is happening. Sometimes I'll be sitting in a class and people will say something that sounds so much smarter than anything I could ever string together, and we're in the same class learning the same things. Sometimes I genuinely worry that if I spoke up in class I would sound like a complete idiot, so I never say anything, and maybe that's part of the problem. For example, in French, we all have to participate and speak in French as often as possible, and my professor last semester made sure that we were always speaking French and not English. Everyone would say something out loud at least once or twice a class, and if something was pronounced wrong he would work with you until you got it right. That semester was my highest French grade so far. (Let's ignore the fact that I have no idea what's going on in French this semester oops.) I think that part of active learning is engaging with the material, and I don't really engage unless I absolutely have to because I constantly worry about being wrong.

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While I take notes and (mostly) go to classes, sometimes I feel like none of the information is sticking, which is infuriating. Even in my favorite classes, I feel like all of the information gets jumbled around. Perhaps I need to develop better study habits, or maybe I should try to be more confident in my abilities, but even then, I can only pretend to be so smart. For example, earlier today my mom asked me what I did in school and I said that "I had two presentations. One was about the discourse community of the editing career and the other was about how graduation can be seen as a dramatic ritual or ceremony." Sure, the phrase "discourse community" sounds intelligent, but could I tell you what it means? Maybe. Right now, I would say that a discourse community is a group of people and how they interact, but is that correct? I don't know. (Update: Googled it to double check and I was on the right page. It's actually a "group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals." So I had the bare bones definition, which kind of proves my point that I'm an academic fraud?)

Now I'm definitely not a legitimate academic fraud like those rich people who bribed their way into college or anything, but I think that I overthink things, which causes me to think that I have no knowledge about anything, which then makes me feel like a fraud. I've been feeling like this for a while and I don't know if I'm being too hard on myself, or maybe I've just become a worse student since coming to college? In high school, I worked my ass off to get straight A's (plus the one B I allowed myself in math) in order to get into a good college, and now that I'm actually in college, I don't have that motivation to be the best anymore. I don't have any plans to go to graduate school, so once I get my Bachelor's I'm done. This lack of drive/motivation has allowed me to worry less about my grades. Currently, out of the six classes I'm taking this semester, I have four A's and two B's that are teetering on an A. Hell, I can't remember which semester it was, but I allowed myself to have three B's in one semester, which I never would have allowed in high school. I think that this is definitely another factor that comes into play. Even though I know that a B is still a good grade and my GPA is still pretty high, maybe I can't get over the fact that I've allowed myself to have a B in the first place. And trust me, I know this sounds completely ridiculous, but as someone who has literally always pushed myself to be the best, allowing myself to be less than "perfect" in some classes causes me to feel less intelligent even though that's definitely not the case.

I'm going to end this rambly post before I start overthinking myself to death. As of right now, I only have one more day of classes, then I have a few finals next week, with only one actually being on campus. Hopefully my next post will be less self-destructive, but you never know. (I say as if I don't have a whole page of blog post ideas just waiting to be written.) If you also feel like a fraud at all, I would love to hear about it. I don't know how the comments on this goddamn site work now that Google killed Google+ but if there still is a comment box you can type something there (or just reply to my tweet if you're from Twitter and made it this far I guess lol). Anyways, I hope life is treating all of you well and I hope if you also have finals soon that they don't kill you.