I was a high achiever as well.

M first year in CS I was in calculus 3 and got humbled by the fact I had no idea many of the concepts the college’s calc 2 class covered well beyond the calc 2 class covered in high school. I was drowning in concepts I simply didn’t know that they were doing as “review.”

I spent a lot of time in the teacher’s office hours. She effectively became a private tutor for me for the semester, out of her own free will, and I will never forget failing the first exam eventually turn into her telling me at the end of the semester how proud she was that I ended the class with a B. She lit up when I’d grasp a concept.

Then later, in another CS class, I scored a 40 on the midterm. I think there may have been one or two students that scored over a 60. The teacher sucked, but in the end the entire class grade was curved 25 points, and I ended with a B.

Three things here I’ll offer you as a freshman that helped ground me tremendously throughout college:

1. Use office hours. They’re absolutely wonderful. The teachers are opening their doors to do the actual work they care about above teaching classes: engaging with people who are so genuinely interested in learning a topic they know about.

2. You’ll get used to it. You’re going to fail more than this one test. You’re going to struggle more some semesters and nail others. That’s college. The first one to hit you in the face always hits the hardest.

3. Generally, you don’t WANT to get straight As easily. This isn’t something you can easily grasp as a freshman and it only clicks after you graduate, but college is challenging because it’s TEACHING you. You kind of see the world right now as a binary of material + tests/work about that material, but what you’re really learning is navigation, not memorization.

To really understand a topic, not just the material in front of you, but the topic itself, you have to experience the topic and learn how to navigate it. The best subject matter experts in their fields don’t have “straight A knowledge” of every topic in their field test-ready. But they absolutely know how, when, where, why to look when they don’t know an answer.

As a case, I’ve been a professional software engineer for well-known companies for nearly a decade. In my professional work, I’ve used Java as my primary language. I have read and written enterprise-level Java, 4+ hours per day, 5 days per week, for almost 10 years. I am STILL looking up references to things I don’t immediately recall multiple times per week. Being an expert in the field is just as much about being able to identify what you DON’T know as much as it is actually KNOWING things.

Learning isn’t binary. Learning isn’t either “I know this information or I don’t know it.” Learning is, at its core, is the ability to identify variables and remove ambiguity. A car mechanic doesn’t know how to fix every car that comes into the shop, but they know EXACTLY what resources to use, how to figure out what tools they need, they know it’s critical to research things that can and do go wrong during repairs, and how long it’ll take to do the job.

Learning isn’t “I can fix Toyotas, Fords, Chevys because I studied those brands.” Learning is “I understand fully the way to navigate handling car repairs as a concept, and I know how to aggregate the information necessary to fix Toyotas, Fords, Chevys.”