I graduated secondary school with grades I am not proud of.
I passed all my exams, and looking back, I did the best I could with the situation I was in. For higher education, I thought I knew what I wanted to study, and I got into a course at a not-so-great school. Remember—this is Asia, and prestige matters.
Then one day I got a call from my soon-to-be ex-best friend, telling me to apply for a popular study programme that was hard to get into. It was considered the course to get into at the polytechnic. The minimum grade requirement was low enough that I could apply, but every student who applied had to take a written test and then sit an interview.
So there I was, applying. I did the written test. I did the interview. If you asked me today what was asked, I could not tell you. It may have had to do with current affairs, since it was a mass communication course. Honestly, I would have been thrilled to get in, but I had no expectations—not with my crappy grades.
Then one fine day, I got the letter of acceptance.
To say I was shocked would not express it enough.
My so-called best friend got in too, as I expected. My other classmate—the one I was close to, the one I thought was my friend for the last two years—did not. She had better grades. She came from a rich family, an artistic family, all of that. And she did not get in.
I started the course, finding my place and bearing rather well. Me being who I was, I did not realise I was well liked by everyone. I only found out years later, from a classmate.
This was also the time I learned something else.
The classmate I was close to—the one who, more or less, would not have had any friends if she did not hang out with me—started going around saying I was not worthy of being there. That I was not talented enough or artistic enough to have gotten in. She had been rejected, then put on the waiting list after her family pulled some strings.
The lesson I learned here was this: people will be jealous of you even when you cannot see why or how. And I got into that course on my own merit, without help from anyone. My own talent did that.
I may not have been the beautiful, popular girl everyone was in awe of. But I was also not the last person to get invited anywhere. I always had friends around me. It was only looking back that I saw it clearly.
People liked me for me. My personality. Not because of some superficial thing.
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