The world is full of opportunities it just needs people to have the courage to walk that extra mile to achieve what they desire. I did my secondary education from my hometown (a small town in Punjab). I wanted to pursue my higher my education in the field of Engineering so with hopes of joining the premier engineering institutes in the country I began my journey to KOTA: the education hub. But I was not alone I was accompanied with horde of almost 2,00,000 other students who came to this city with similar hopes and aspirations in mind. Being a pampered kid staying away from home was difficult, mixing up with the kids from different cultures was new and the overall experience was joyful for the first few days.
And indeed, the things changed everyone started running in a race to get to the same place with limited entries. The feeling of homesickness and frustration for the system started catching upto me, meanwhile the new friends I had made over the course of few days also started to behave like enemies on battlefield working on their secret strategies to work one up on the other in the exams. As if all this was not enough results of the first review tests were around the corner. I had started to have weird cases of panic and anxiety attacks with a feeling of being left out of the race feelings perhaps too complex for a kid of 16 to understand. Then came the results and the person who had been consistently been in the top performers of his school had failed in the exams. The failure was huge and the peer pressure just added fuel to the fire. The anxiety turned into depression over the next few months. The load of responsibilities and expectations was immense. Depression had taken over all the daily activities, I did not feel hunger or thirst anymore. The feeling of not being good enough loomed over my head all the time. Along with my mental health my physical health had started taking a toll, I used to fall sick very often.
Like in every story a silver lining in dark clouds bestowed upon me in form of my Physics teacher. He understood my condition without me telling anything to him. He offered to mentor me, possibly an opportunity I had been looking for all this while perhaps someone to tell me its ok to fail. He never mentioned my marks or ranks terms that had haunted me for almost a year. He just taught me how to learn. I started to focus on learning the concepts rather than studying to get marks in the exam. Initially it was hard because we as students have been fundamentally tuned to measure the degree of success by the marks we get. But I decided not to get ahead of myself and try to just take one step at a time.
Slowly but surely things started to change I started getting more and more clarity on the subject matters which also reflected in the performance in the coveted review tests.
I realized during this time that you can either be depressed about the failures you have had or you can treat these failures as an opportunity to learn improve yourself. These values not only helped me in securing admissions in one of the premier engineering institute in the country also in securing a well paying job after that.
The success or failure of any individual are very personal to him/her. I am just sharing this because I believe my story (even though not the greatest ), might help some individuals who are facing the situations like I did. The only advice I can give them is keep at it treat the failures as learning opportunities and to never forget the people who stood by you in this time.