“My A-Level results are so bad, just let me enter university”: rash decisions for the sake of a degree
“It was a big f*cking mistake la… now my GPA is 2.6/5.0 and I am already in Year 2 Sem 2. How to quit now when I’ve already loaned all this money? How do I go on either when my score is already so shitty? Honestly it’s very hard to see any way out other than to complete the degree, yet I know two years in advance that the degree is not going to be great and I now don’t know who might hire me.” The November 2021 Singapore-Cambridge A-Level results were released in late February 2022, and most post-A-Level students spent the following month working on their university applications. Every season, some students would find themselves with suffocatingly limited choices due to their scores falling short of most faculties’ prerequisites and Indicative Grade Profiles. A handful of students go on to indiscriminately apply and subsequently accept any course they’re offered. Such a risky move is neither a necessary nor healthy course of action for our friends.
Dear Reader,
University admission offers in Singapore are underway between now and July. These milestone decisions may well influence the next four years of many young adults — many of whom are our friends.
If you or someone you know worries about not proceeding into university after pre-tertiary education (particularly Junior College in Singapore), and as a result is desperate to just enter university for the sake of it, I genuinely hope you share this article with them, or simply repost this in the hope that someone out there who needs this, sees this in time. Thank you.
Doing well: compare lah, compare some more
Kay (not her real name) and I laid down the pros and cons of her just taking the admission offer from Engineering in Nanyang Technological University (NTU). The biggest con of the lot was this: she was hardly interested in Engineering; the offer came as a surprise from her attempt at trying her luck in the applications process using the A-Level scores she had.
According to Kay, she had not done well for her A-Levels. Her scores were a mix of Bs, Cs, and Ds. But it was challenging to say unequivocally that she had done well, because Kay did not have a target university course with which she could use to decide what ‘doing well’ meant, in reference to her scores. If Kay had always wanted to enrol into Economics at Singapore Management University (SMU), which admitted students with Bs, and Cs at the time, then she would not have done too well in the sense that she might not have had a comfortable shot at making it into SMU Economics.
It is honestly okay to not have a university faculty-specific target set, even up to the point of receiving our A-Level results. Perhaps our exploration is done over time, with our interests possibly evolving in the process. However, that would also mean that for a long time throughout their Junior College (JC) years, many A-Level students would tend to have an ambiguous barometer for what ‘doing well’ is.
In many cases for them, ‘doing well’ simply means ‘having more options’. Ah, having more options — a comfortable cover-all, umbrella-like state that does not require us to think too deeply. We hear it all too often: just work hard now, and you will have more options. As a result, for some students relying on this metric and this metric only, they come to the end of the line on A-Level results day concluding that they did not do well because they find themselves with much fewer options than others. Like my friend, Kay.
From the above, it infers that ‘doing well’ tends to comprise a comparative element. Indeed, it seems almost necessary. But there are many instances where this comparative tool is misused. Therefore, just as Kay compared the number of options available to her, she, like many of her peers, also compared their grades to decide how well they had done.
To the more statistically-inclined, much of our grades comparisons are the curse of the normal distribution bell curve. We will always have the upper quartile of ‘A’s, and the lower quartile of ‘D’s and ‘E’s. Without thinking too much, the ‘A’-scorers will be seen and see themselves as having done well, primarily because they attained higher scores than the rest of the population. Scored ‘D’s and ‘E’s, and have the cheek to say we have done well? Please, let’s stop kidding ourselves!
But options, statistics, and the like — these are neither the main issues or the things to blame. The spectre of comparison against others, along with the lack of self-awareness, is what often leaves us either unmotivated midway through our journeys, or woefully unprepared when making big decisions. This article focuses on the latter, and I have seen many like Kay who reached the point of decision-making with all the troubles described above, end up deciding long-term decisions for themselves in ways that could have been much healthier if only they allowed themselves more breathing room. If only they allowed themselves healthier ways to determine what doing well meant for them.
Doing well
Kay’s scores looked safe applying to NUS Engineering at the time, with the latter’s Indicative Grade Profile showing an acceptance of students with Bs, Cs, and Ds. But a big issue was that Kay was never interested in engineering to begin with. If she had had her eye on NUS Engineering, and scored the prerequisite scores to safely enrol in the course, we should have said that Kay did splendidly well! Given that the contrary occured, we could not say that Kay had done well even as far as enrolling in NUS Engineering was concerned. This is neither about NUS Engineering being a ‘good course’ or not. It is all about the way Kay, and many students similar to Kay, struggled to make time to deeply understand themselves and instead made decisions based on unhelpful comparisons.
Dear reader, how have you decided what doing well means to you?
From the time she collected her results, Kay felt devastated because, by comparison with others, and no other goals of her own for reference, Kay could only tell herself that her grades were lousy.
Kay then applied to NUS Engineering because, by comparison with others, she believed she did not have many options to begin with. So she applied for whatever option was available.
Finally, to hammer the nail in her pre-tertiary coffin, Kay compared the trajectory of her life to her peers — saw and believed that the norm was to go on to university in the year following one’s A-Levels, and could not accept the thought of yet another comparative dissonance from the population.
In many ways, Kay was a mix of feeling afraid of being left out, losing out, falling behind, being judged by others; Kay admitted in her heart that she had pride and a face to save; Kay was unwilling to contemplate various other futures — perhaps because it seemed too much work, or that it might mean an acceptance of some sort of defeat, or that naïvely, she really was interested in engineering.
Interested
I believe it is important to be honest with ourselves between knowing when we merely find something interesting, and actually having an observable and testable form of interest in that same thing.
For instance, reading the prospectus of NUS’ College of Humanities and Sciences (CHS) before commenting ‘this sounds interesting — I could see myself doing this’, is not a reliable display of interest. A reliable display of interest might involve asking students and alumni — and even staff and faculty, for their honest opinion. And to really listen to how they might respectfully tear apart your assumptions of life in CHS and your potential fit in CHS, saving yourself from any confirmation bias in the process. A reliable display of interest might involve reading some of the typical material from this course, or attempting a free trial of a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in the same field and seeing that you did not doze off after 40-minutes.
This distinction of feeling interested and actually demonstrating interest is all the more important when we are in too much of an emotional state to make clear-headed decisions.
Sure, due diligence takes time, and there is general insight from the saying, ‘you never know until you try’. But due diligence should really mean something more than open houses and brochures when the thing being tried is a major four-year commitment to a field of study at the level of being labelled ‘higher education’.
Below the surface, problems fester
Kay eventually took the offer from NUS Engineering and joined the seasonal wave of tens of thousands of freshly matriculated undergraduates. For a while, Kay was happy; being in a place where countless others of her peers were also at, felt safe and normal. For a little while, the pain and suffering of feeling out of place and out of pace was alleviated.
That is until work had to actually be done, and young adulthood had reached a point where the aforementioned ‘just work hard now, and you will bla bla bla’ was no longer going to, well, work anymore.
Two years later, in her second year of studies, Kay was not doing well in Engineering. She was not doing well because the perennial question of what doing well meant for her never got answered in the seasons that followed. Once saying she would ‘just work hard now’ or in her case ‘just get in uni now’ and ‘think about the rest later’, she never really went on to do it. Because it is human nature. If Kay was not going to do it — to think long and hard about her experiences and have honest conversations about them so as to possibly broaden her perspectives — when presented with such a big decision as to decide on NUS Engineering, it was unlikely she was going to do it when she got into NUS.
In words similar to the stories above, Kay was merely at one point, only feeling interested to ‘think about the rest later’. But once the pain was alleviated and the crisis averted, she never proceeded to actually demonstrate her interest and think about how she made such a high risk manoeuvre in choosing to enrol into university for the sake of it and how she could avoid making such high risk moves again. She might have genuinely thought she would, and I am sure as well that an occasional reader might also think they would not be as silly as Kay. But we are all probably silly in thinking Kay’s behaviour is uncommon to the point of not befalling on us.
Alas, Kay was not doing well because Kay never got to figuring out and living out what doing well for her was. As a result, Kay did not do well in her grades. She did not do well to keep up her social circles. She was not doing well mentally, and when such things translated into insomniac nights or persistent migraines, Kay was also not doing well physically. Eventually, Kay acknowledged the snowball that began rolling downhill towards her when she chose to enrol in university out of fear. The snowball got bigger and bigger until its potential force upon impact left her hoping she could have just gone back to the start and allowed herself to stop listening to the rest of the world for a while in order to listen to herself and any (nb. plural) whom she trusted and cared enough for her to counsel her.
Kay eventually graduated, and had to learn many lessons the hard way. These hard ways included the knowledge that her degree would at most be a second lower honours by the time she was in her third year, making the final two years of her university life feel like a nihilist sojourn of meaningless pursuit. She went on to face several more crises, but she eventually did find the space to have those serious conversations with herself. Kay grew to learn that if she did not take ownership of the important questions when she should, one day a crisis would do it for her.
Shortly after university, Kay was no longer as miserable as she was, after learning to slow down on all fronts when it helped. She learned to love herself more — enough to think properly and be receptive to meaningful conversations about impending big decisions. It may seem like it all turned out fine in the end, but really, most of her hardship could have been prevented.
Kay proved to be one of many examples why it is not wise to rashly enrol in university in order to remove the pain we feel at the moment.
Sure, but does it always have to be this way?
I would still like the reader to know that the rashness has ever paid off for some people. Well, sort of.
Victoria (not her real name) rashly enrolled into NUS’ Faculty of Science (FOS) only to come to the decision a year later that science was not working out. Unlike Kay, Victoria diagnosed her problem early, and also had the fortune of making a successful appeal to transfer over to another faculty in the university — the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS).
Be that as it may, Victoria learned that her interest in FASS had always been there, but her rashness to dive into FOS, especially never having really felt like a ‘science student’ since JC, left her wondering why she even made the application in the first place. She made the application to FOS because one of the courses had an IGP low enough for her to just make it through, and by Week 6 of her first semester, she realised she had absolutely no interest in what she was learning. Victoria had to spend the next two semesters giving FOS a try after woeful try. It was only towards the end that she thought to find solace in making an internal appeal to transfer her candidature over to FASS, but the endeavour was not without slogging it out in her second semester of FOS to achieve a commendable set of grades that would strengthen her transfer application.
After one year in FOS, Victoria received the rare opportunity to transfer to FASS. It was rare, because such transfers were not handed out generously. There were costs, too. The condition of Victoria’s transfer included starting afresh as a first year student, shifting her expected graduation date back by one year, on top of costing her one extra year of tuition fees. It is up to the reader to guess if a retrospective Victoria might have told her past self to be more open to pathways beyond a rash enrolment.
I caution any reader who might wish to go scheme a la Victoria’s way and enter their original dream course by first enrolling in another course with a much lower IGP. That is simply, and naïvely, planning to conduct a highly risky manoeuvre on top of an already risky manoeuvre.
By this juncture, with Kay and Victoria being representative archetypes of a good number of under-published stories of students in university, I hope the reader who now has more case studies to work with, might do so wisely. Dear reader, it is indeed possible to just get into any university course that might accept you, and be on your way. But I am confident about the alternatives that could have been better, and I believe you deserve better to have me aggregate some of these experiences above to you so that you might make the best choices for yourself given your circumstances.
[Article actually unfinished, but I think I have made enough of a point by now to rush-publish this before editing it on the go. Also because the neighbourhood Koel has alerted me to the fact that it is 7am I have been up writing this since 2am on a work day].
Even if it may seem like the world is rushing you, you should not have to accelerate — what more with your eyes closed. Lest you trip and fall, and hurt yourself more.
Dear reader, it actually takes much more courage to slow down, and turn your pain into wisdom. It may take a little while, but train it like a muscle, and watch it usher in a newfound freedom.
I hope this article has been helpful to you.
Marcus
