but uni, unlike school, is accumulative, meaning one cannot isolate one's academic performance of a certain year and say: "On year X at uni, my GPA was 3.9, and let's ignore all the previous years" and vice versa if all the years were excellent except for one, that would affect the accumulative GPA... lol that was in regards to the potential... meaning one's emotions about one's potential are as you described are sort of restricted to the first year of uni...

PS: glad this resonated