First Day of College — A Lesson in Humility

I thought I knew everything, but I couldn’t be more wrong

Connecting the dots

I was in the 9th grade in high school, when I realized that I like psychology. I felt that somehow connecting the dots within this field of knowledge was easier for me. I didn’t know why I liked it more than other domains, but I did.

Over the years that would become clear to me why I liked learning about the human psyche, as I tried to learn other things. I was excited about learning something, but it wasn’t as easier as learning psychology. I noticed something else too, when I tried to make predictions or to try to think about the implications of an idea, it was easier when it came to psychology. I couldn't do the same for chemistry or maths, my mind would go blank when I would try to think, what could be the next step in the furthering of a process I learned about.

I still had ferocious curiosity, and I tried to learn about different subjects. I determined that I had many limitations, I couldn’t remember that much, I couldn’t process information very fast and I felt that some ideas I couldn’t understand at all. At a certain point in my teenage years I decided that if I want to try to understand more about this life, I should try to remove these limitations.

A choice

I concluded that to remove these limitations, I would study psychology. My opinion was that this would lead me to discover the ways through which these limitations are surpassed. I had a naive understanding of what psychology was, and I thought that these sorts of problems were solved, and there were answers somewhere. Later in my college years, I would find that things like the fact that IQ( Intelligence Quotient) cannot be changed in a significant way. IQ is a measure used in psychometric tests to measure a person’s intelligence. I won’t get into that idea in this article, but I don’t believe that IQ is the ultimate measure for one’s intelligence nor the fact that intelligence cannot be improved. We haven’t found a clear way yet, but there are crumbs of knowledge spread around, that one day, might solve this issue of improving one’s intelligence.

After I decided to follow a bachelor's in Psychology, I had to take an exam. The exam wasn’t that hard and I had almost a perfect score. I thought that I was more or less a genius, without any significant results or relevant achievements to speak of. My ego was an inflated flying balloon, and it was bouncing around just being ready to explode at the first contact with reality.

A different dimension of knowledge

It was the first day of college, I was standing in front of a door that would lead to a statistics class with my classmates. There was a lot of emotion in the air, fear, anxiety, and excitement. We heard a lot about the professor and how hard this subject was. We were also late because we didn’t find the right class on time, so we didn’t know whether we should enter or not. A girl in front of me took initiative and entered, we followed right after. The professor was very charismatic and a nice person, but I could sense an air of authority that he imposed. He knew what he was talking about and how important it was. Statistics is the backbone in the analysis of experiments that are conducted within psychology. It was a vital subject and we had to know it to understand psychology.

He was speaking fast about difficult concepts, but it was incredible. He was very enthusiastic about what he was teaching and it sparked my curiosity to greater heights. He wanted to create engagement and asked a lot of questions. I wanted to answer a question but I was nervous, at that time I wasn’t really comfortable speaking in front of a crowd and just thinking about it made me anxious. I did it anyway, in my mind aside from my anxiety, I still thought I was second only to Freud in psychology. My answer was wrong, after that, I tried several times, and I was wrong again. How could it be? I thought I was very good at this, not only that I wasn’t getting the answers right, some of my classmates, managed to answer correctly. My reality was shattering, I realized that I was just a small fish in the ocean, and there were bigger fish, that were capable to dive into another dimension of understanding in the ocean of psychology knowledge.

A new resolution

After that incident where I was feeling as smart as a chatting bot, I decided to further my knowledge and to be more prepared in my future classes. I assessed my new place in the kingdom of psychology knowledge, and I realized there is work to do.

I wasn’t sad because of what happened, I was just shown that there was a lot more of what I didn’t know about and I just found a place of deeply passionate people that love the same subject as me.

Over the next year, I would learn everything I could about statistics, and I developed a real interest in it. It was all because of my university professor's enthusiasm, he had a way of painting beautiful images around hard concepts. I answered a lot of questions, some of my answers were right and some were wrong. I seemed to impress my professor because I tended to persist in trying to answer and to understand. I wasn’t only reading about this subject but also the others, leading to good scores in exams that resulted in a scholarship. I wouldn’t say that the scholarship was the highlight of my college experience but something else.

In my second year of college, I attended a statistics class even though that subject wasn’t in my annual curriculum anymore, but I did it because I wanted to. The professor invited me to sit with him in front of the class as he was teaching. After making an announcement about study groups for students, he asked me if I don’t want to help other students by becoming a tutor in a study group. I was shocked but the shock didn’t end there, he asked me if I would like to teach a class for the first-year students (I was a second-year student at the time). I was baffled, and so happy. The same professor that demolished my inflated ego now offered me such an opportunity.

That moment and kind offer made me realize that in part I overcame my limitations. Through a better mindset, hard work, and persistence I became good at something. I gained humility in the process at it shaped the way I looked at the world. I was so wrong in my assessment of my knowledge, I thought I knew everything but in reality, I knew almost nothing. It was exhilarating. A new reality has taken shape before my eyes, its brightness was almost unbearable, but my eyes were starting to adjust to it.