Venting I just failed my finals

[alreadyfound]

Today, I failed my final exams in my last year of college. I submitted a paper that was completely off-topic. I won't get a passing grade, and there's a real risk that I could fail the entire year and have to repeat it. The worst part isn't even the failure itself, it's the fact that the papers aren't anonymous, so the professor will see how stupid and incapable I am. I think I'm going to get the worst grade in my class. Tomorrow I have another exam that I'll probably fail too, and then I'll have an oral exam where I'm going to humiliate myself because I'm just a loser, a stupid, lazy failure who deserves to die.

I hate growing up. My whole life, people told me I was some kind of genius just because I taught myself how to read and was interested in philosophy and things like that. But now it's over, and every year I fail more and more. I just want to die so it can stop. It's too painful and humiliating to watch my own downfall like this. I can't even kill myself because it would seem so pathetic. People would just say, "She killed herself because she failed an exam?" But the truth is that failure is just the external proof that I'm fundamentally worthless.

I'm not sociable, not pretty, not athletic. The only thing I've ever been good at is thinking. That made me feel different and even superior to other people. I wasn't alone because I am unbearable, but because I was too intelligent for anyone to understand me. And now I'm nothing.

I'm so afraid.

 

[fantamaxxer]

youre alr better then the half for just getting into collage. Also, dont think about it to much, it wont help your mood

 

[Lamentice]

I kind of understand... I haven't been to college but I have a record of doing well and then completely failing for middle school and high school. I started middle school rated above my grade level.. and then didn't graduate 8th grade and had to be "socially promoted" into 9th with my peer group. Then I did well enough my 1st year of high school to be put in advanced classes.. and then I finished my last 2 years with F's and D's and C's (graduated on a technicality that I found and emailed my counselor about, otherwise I wasn't gonna graduate).

Academia is a really specific system and environment, I feel like (personally) it's unnatural to learn in academia, maybe the way it's structured just doesn't work for you: that's not a failure of you, but it is really depressing.. a lot of the way society is structured is just absurdly difficult-impossible for anyone minus a select group, I'm not even sure who exactly that group is, but I know it's not us, and I know it's an intentional design aspect.

 

[redmourningdove]

I guarantee if you were considered a genius and a superior thinker for this long, that isn't going to end just because of one final paper. You made it to your last year of college; most don't even make it this far. Academia rewards a very specific skill of surviving certain constraints under pressure. Not for being the sharpest thinker or the strongest learner, just for checking the boxes the professor was looking for. I won't undersell school's importance: knowing how to check boxes is an important skill, but the score on the final paper doesn't define how much you've learned or grown from writing the essay and all your other coursework.
People have always called me talented at math, and while I love studying it and learning it, I do terrible under the rigid time pressure and constraints of an exam. To study for dozens of hours only to do poorly because I couldn't go through the motions in under an hour: we're being treated like ROBOTS, not humans. Many people who AI-generate all their work will get even higher grades than me. Do you consider those people to be good at thinking? People who cheated on that final essay and got an A, are they better at thinking than you?
Even if our college defines failure, only WE can define success. You should reflect on your failures; think carefully about why your paper went off-topic, why the oral exam may not have went the way you planned it to. But if you let the final score define you, you become exactly the robot your terrible professors want you to be. But you will NEVER be a robot. You're a human that grows and adapts to fit the circumstances. You're just as smart as you think you are, even if that's hard to believe right now. Take care, and I hope your studies take you where you want to be.