Deprecation v1

Deprecation lol. It’s a funny word. I only came across it recently when reading the python documentation and some language feature was ‘deprecated’ loool what does that even mean? Turns out, that’s the perfect word to describe what’s going on with me right now.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how bleak my future career prospects are as a chemical engineer in Nigeria really are. Some of this of course is due to my own incompetence, negligence and let it be said lack of grit. A lot of it has to with external circumstances beyond my control. I’ll talked about all of this in more detail. I’ll explained how my projects outside and within academics had failed miserably time and time again. How I essentially gave up on taking ownership and responsibility of the direction in my life. This of course didn’t last longer than a few months but still, a significant enough setback coupled on the failures themselves, it has presently become something to reckon with. To understand my current thought process let’s put this into perspective.

I graduated secondary school with above average grades nothing special. I didn’t play any sports or attend any clubs or extracurriculars simply because they weren’t available to me. The math club I joined early in my secondary school days got scraped for lack of funding. I tried my best attending a few extra classes here and there. Any opportunity I was afforded to challenge myself, I took. Sometimes it worked out, few meaningless little tokens won here and there, a few awards and distinctions but nothing ever noteworthy. I even took advanced math classes which I did poorly at unfortunately (spoiler alert as much as I love intellectualism I’m no math wiz or anything wiz per se). I had a different plan for my life back then but then the singular greatest deflector was when I failed my first university entrance exam JAMB. I have a distrust for what happened during this examination and I truly believe to this day it does not reflect my actual scores. How could I have mostly B’s and and an A in my WAEC (I did get a D in further mathematics though? lol I suck at advanced math :( ) and still manage to get 160/400 on an objective based test cut across four subjects math(not advanced mind you I eat regular math for brunch), english, physics and chemistry?

My parents assumed the fault lay with me and I took a mandatory gap year. I was 15 going on 16 at the time so I was fairly young. Truth be told, maybe I really did fail that exam, it’s possible. I however feel there’s a serious systemic problem with the education system in Nigeria as a whole and it doesn’t usually reflect who knows what. Who am I to say? What evidence do I have to accuse an entire system of failure and me as an individual an exception knowing some truth? Where’s my evidence? Where’s the hard cold proof? I don’t have any really.

During this time I attended the CPES programme at FUTMinna. Something like an interim crash course on basic secondary school stuff and preferential treatment in the admission process. Simply because that’s the school my older brother got into. I myself would’ve rather gone to ABU Zaria. A much better school in my opinion. I never got that chance. So, I applied to chemical engineering and I got admission. All was well with the world again. I lost a year, I was 17. I felt like I needed to redeem myself for slightly distorting the life plan. As a result I challenged myself outside academics, I became the class rep, got involved in campus politics, I read extensively on philosophy, psychology, economics, george orwell, anything essentially that piqued my interest. I attended ALL MY CLASSES. Now if you know anything about public universities in Nigeria you know how terrible it is. It’s overcrowded, you can barely hear the lecturer, it’s really really really horrible. You often have to sit on the floor, from 8am to 5pm with an hour break (which was essentially non-existent for me as I usually had other duties), some lecturers threaten you with automatic failure for whimsical reasons, nothing to say of the content being taught itself loool that is another matter entirely deserving a long article, really it is a sight to behold. Whatever I was super serious. A typical day I’d have lecturers all day, organize logistics for the class, prep stuff etc then. I’d go BACK to school to attend TUTORIALS which are essentially classes organised by students and and the student union government. Then I’d walk home at night 3.3 kilometers almost everyday. Unfortunately when results came around I was reward with my first gpa 2.90/5.

I had gotten a D in a course that was essentially about the use of english, I remember that. The results seemed ridiculous. This meant I was underperforming already. Not average, underperforming. Okay, I figured I MUST be doing something wrong so I tweaked my approach the next semester. I read harder, I tried to sit at the very front of the class for most classes by playing political favorite. I collected all the material, I joined a few people that I knew were doing better in a makeshift study group. I studied HARD. Understand this I am not gifted intellectually, but I felt if I had methodically gone through all the material, absorbed the basic concepts and gone through all of the material I should at least put up an average performance. The material itself was nothing new. It was just a rehash of secondary school stuff. There were no advanced topics. They weren’t teaching anything I didn’t already extensively study. Theoretically all it would take to reach a 3.5 which was my goal were C’s in every course! Surely this is reasonable enough. Surely the meticulous overkill I put in would probably get me higher than usual in courses and almost guarantee my 3.5. The net result? a 3.0/5. An increase of 0.1.

I couldn’t accept it. It was wrong. I knew it was wrong. There was massive abuse happening somewhere in this system. These grades did not and could not reflect my level of understanding of these subjects. They did not represent the things I had put down (or clicked it was a massive objective based exam). What did I do? What could I do? I couldn’t challenge it. I wanted out. I took the SATs against better judgement. I studied for it, SOLO. With the laptop I still use today and the help of a hotspot, I researched all there was to know about getting an education outside Nigeria, since switching to another school was exceptionally difficult, near impossible and even at that, the conditions aren’t significantly better to warrant quitting on my current admission and going through the almost lottery process of gaining another admission.

I took the SATs and I didn’t do well enough. I failed essentially. 1270/1600 for a poor international student? It wasn’t going to cut it. Somewhere in the middle of all of this I started a little known charity “Touch of Hope” the irony being that I tried to provide some of this information to kids still in school who could maybe find a better way out and leverage this, that crashed and burned when I ran out money. I had one shot at that exam, I had one chance and I failed.

Nonetheless, I was still going hard. A little battered and beaten, I wasn’t going as strong but I was still going. 200l was going to be different. The exams are written on paper, a human would see what I wrote, the classes are smaller(relatively) and the content is specialized to engineering. I dropped politics and my class rep position so I’d have more time to myself. This was when I partnered with 5 other people to start a rice processing business and I tried to organize a TEDx event at my school. This was also the period I tried to learn a little programming. Oh and I still had my blog active-ish then. Every single project crashed and burned. I couldn’t find enough people to help with organizing the TEDx (plus I was lazy), I couldn’t find funding for the event (unfortunately the recession just about hit at the time), the rice processing business model did okay for a prototype, but we still ended up with a little loss. I was incharge of managing finances and research however, I had many many flaws in the handling of this. I quit programming, ironically because I got a C in an intro to programming class of which I knew or at least I thought I knew and my friends who had zero cs knowledge got A’s.

Looking back I can see a lot of this was due to immaturity was mostly my own fault. If I had stepped up and became better, things wouldn’t have ended up so badly. I also resumed the first semester quite late, I didn’t take notes and instead lazily photocopied them from a friend, I felt attending class was pointless, I missed assignments, I was lazy and disheartened. I was partly recovering from the failure of my sats, I was partly unsure that even if I did take my studies seriously would it have any real effect? This was a critical flaw in my thinking. Critical because it cost me everything, from underperforming I traveled down fast to failure. I failed three courses. This I take full responsibility for. There was a lot going on at the time, but I failed because I was unserious. The singular greatest factor correlating with my failure was simply my attitude and general outlook. The result? 1.5 / 5 with 3 deficiencies a total of 8 units of “carry over”.

The failures hit me hard, once you fail a course in a typical public Nigerian university you can never unfail. You don’t learn from mistakes. Not when they are this critical. Once you fail it has a cumulative detrimental effect on your grades and ability to perform…forever. From that point onward, it doesn’t matter if you realize the mistake. It doesn’t matter if you do better. You will not get the chance to do any better. The structure becomes incrementally harder for no apparent reason. I failed three courses totalling 45 units. Ouch.

However I’m getting ahead of myself.

See, in my second semester of 200L after I saw the carryovers I became a lot more “serious” with my studies but I only did what I knew how to do, because I never figured out how to truly excel at this institution, because I didn’t find a unique solution to this towering problem? I did the exact same thing I knew how to do. The result? Predictable 3/5. It was more of the same, the same study routines, the same methodology, it was a panicked response. I read hard and did my “best”.

Then in 300L first semester the outcome was painfully obvious. No matter how hard I tried it wouldn’t work. At best I would get a 3.0 or something around this + or -. This was a fatal flaw in judgement. An emotional response, A decision biased by a pessimistic, self-defeatist attitude characteristic of depression. Lol so I took a long break to rediscover myself. To find out what the hell I was doing with myself. The old plan was dead. All of the worst possible cases came through and were significantly worse than I could’ve imagined. I needed a new plan. I needed to figure out what I was doing wrong. I needed guidance, clarity and direction. What did I do? The exact opposite of what I needed. I distracted myself, I lied to myself. I put in no effort beyond appearances. It was a sad time. I was also going through some personal stuff with my family. That I don’t think I’ll ever mention in a blog post. It was a horrid time. The result? perfect E’s. lool 1/5. no deficiency.

After this I realized giving up and not caring about consequences and postponing decisions had well.. consequences. I tried to change. I cleaned myself up and got out of what has to be one of the darkest depressions I have experienced. I’m usually a characteristically unhappy person but these were dark times. A little encourage from what few friends still cared if I lived or died and a lot of powering through with sheer will, I picked up the pieces of my broken life and put it back together little by little. If I could do better? I tried to do better anyway I knew how. The result? 3.05 /5

This was what I missed all along ultimately. For all my many mistakes and flaws, I underestimated this one little thing. The ability of small consistent improvement. See if I had kept giving it my all, if I never gave up with a dogged determination to do better at every turn and push myself to the absolute limit, I would’ve reached my goal. 0.1 at a time. I just needed to do EXACTLY what I was doing and not for once let up. It was a game of attrition. It was a game of who would break first. Had I kept on getting small improvements on my GPA this would’ve added up eventually. Slowly to be sure, it would’ve taken the full 5 years but I would’ve reached it through consistent dedicated hard-work and simple grit.

Beyond the maddening external circumstances surrounding each semester, I could have been all that I wanted to be, by not focusing on what I lacked and had to achieve and consistently failed to achieve but by understanding what I achieved how I achieved it, why I didn’t achieve it and how I could have done better and what I needed to change to make those important minute micro changes. I should’ve evaluated who I was at that specific point in time, what I needed to change and do to become who I wanted to be and stick with it. It was that simple.

When I realized this of course is in 400 L. I made many mistakes here, but I took this to heart. I did all that I could do. Everything that my mind and body could handle I did. Whatever limits imposed upon me by external circumstance I navigated as best as was possible and I never ever gave up. Not until the last second of the last second. I poured my heart and my soul into this semester. I was determined to write the wrongs as much as I could. It wasn’t enough ultimately. Hard work and focus alone can’t build Rome. Determination and consistency cannot undo years of damage, they can stop the bleeding at best but never heal the wound. This I’m grateful for at least. The result? 2.87/5 with two carry overs.

Lol.

Seems pretty bleak doesn’t it? I’m start my final session(hopefully) with a cgpa of 2.38/5 and 10 units of carry over. One four unit course chemical reaction kinetics, 2 units process instrumentation, 2 units lab, 2 units material science.

Boy! o boy. looooooooooooooooooooooooool

That’s not good.

It’s like a monster looming over the horizon waiting. I will have to face this catastrophic disaster head on. Courses will clash. Lecturers might fail me for reasons beyond my control (lol look at what happened with my lab looool who fails lab? I might the first person in the history of ever to fail lab). My schedule will look like something custom made from hell. I don’t even want to think about the amount of stress. Yet, it will come and when the time comes, if you’re scared, tired and alone. If you can’t possibly cram one more formula, if you’ve had it with the heat and the light and everything and everyone else.

Read this. Somehow. This is a message to you in the near dark future. For as long as there is breath in your body you know what you must do. You know when you must do it. You needn’t concern yourself with how. The possibility of success or failure should leave your mind. ONLY the TASK matters. Finish as best as is possible. Weed out every ounce your brain cells can give you. Stretch.

When it seems like you might not even get the chance to do this?

Irrelevant.

Do only what you must and know how to, the best you can.

Even if you can do 0.001% better. That is enough. If that is truly your best. It is enough.

Then you begin again. You have many many challenges waiting for you. EVEN IF you fail. If you tried your possible best and did something remarkable as a result that’s enough. I want you to look back and know.

I want you to stare into the abyss.

I want you to stare at tragedy and absurdity.

I want you to say, If it could have been done I probably did it.

That’s all I want from you.

You might never succeed and that’s okay because you walked the walk. You didn’t get there but you walked the walk. AS long as there was breath in your body you walked the walk.

-All the best.

From a cozy room staring at a computer screen.