Succeeding Academically

Hi,

I want to let you know about my point of view on what is an academic success. What is consider successful academically? Everyone will have a different opinion on this.

Making Decisions to Succeed

As you can read from my work experience on my website, I finished studying in Electrical Engineering at McGill University and was working in engineering companies. Is that considered successful?  I made a personal decision not to go to work in another country, since I have my family here in Montreal. I also made a decision of quitting engineering and work as a full time private tutor. So what does succeeding academically means to me?

Some people think making a lot of money in the future career is coming from academic success. Others think of prestige in the future career is coming from academic success.  I would not deny that succeeding academically will help in your career. However, I do not think it is a big part. Education is the process of learning how to learn on your own, how to make yourself to become a better person, how to become someone who will be contributing to the society.

Working Hard to Succeed

The grades that we get from school is just a measure of reflection on how hard you have worked or studied to get to the results. Although, there are exceptional students that do not need to study hard to obtain good results. How many of these students exist among us?  Even though you are very smart and do not needs to study to get good result from school, this does not mean that you do not need to work hard to earn your living. Does succeeding academically equals to succeeding in our career ?

Ever since I was young, my mother always told me that “Knowledge is something that nobody can steal from you”. Thus knowledge is very precious to me. Whenever I learn something, I will try to retain it and try not to forget about what I learned. If we learn something and we forget about it, then what is the purpose of learning? If you really forget about what you’ve learned, all you have left is the process of how you’ve learned it and not what you’ve learned, which is ok, you still retain the process of learning. For sure the best would be remembering what you have learnt as well.

Doing our Best to Succeed

I always think that as long as we do our best, everything will go well. When I was in high school, after I receive a grade from a test, I always ask myself: “did I put the best effort to study?”  I always have this afterthought, thinking if I studied a little bit more, I might get a better grade. So I try to improve my way of studying over and over until I can answer myself that I have no regret even if I do not do well in a test or exam since I know I put my best effort out of it. I believe as we put out best effort, even though we do not get good results, we should not feel bad about it. Obviously, we have to try different way to study to improve our grade throughout the course. We should not give up easily because of a bad grade on ONE test. And we should not use “I did my best” as an excuse to give up on the course or even school.  Giving up is not facing reality, we need to try to find a way to work around if something does not go the way we wanted to.

Having a Dream and Goal to Succeed

I know that not everyone is clear on what they want to do later in their career. Sometimes it’s hard for you as a student to choose the career path that you want to take. But I believe we should start early to think what we want to do in our life and try to explore more things around us. We should all have a dream and set a goal in life. Once we have a dream or a goal, our academic path will be much clearer. Even though later in life we change our career, like I did, at least I tried to obtain the goal that I wanted before. I wanted to be an engineer and try to improve the quality of our lives. However, once I started to work, I realized it was not the same as I thought it will be and I knew that it was not a path that I’ll want to pursue personally.  I realized what I really love to do: teaching. This is the reason why I worked hard and still is, for teaching private course, helping you, the students, to improve your studies and try to make you realize what you really want to do in your life. I find this is much more meaningful than me sitting in an office and working with a computer. I made a career choice. I stay in Montreal because I like to be close to my family. I didn’t pursue my career into engineering, because I rather help you, the students, to realize what your potentials are and help you succeed or improve academically.  So what is your goal? What do you want to accomplish in life? How do you want to contribute to this society?

The way that I like to teach is to show you, the students, the path to succeed and not succeeding for you. I never like to give out the answer, I like to ask you questions and lead you to the answer. I like to teach the way you should think, how you should approach a problem. Giving you the answer is easy, but teaching you the way to approach the problem and get to the answer is a challenge.

Finally, I believe succeeding academically is leading us to become the person we will be, how much we will contribute back to the society and how well we can achieve our goals and dreams. Succeeding academically is not only obtaining good results from school, but also in our life !