The best students are from the day they are born, since they have a high IQ and it is almost impossible for the rest of the class to compete with them. They are the first to finish the exam, the nerds, the geeks, and whose success is the result of their innate talent and ability.
In case you have not noticed, the ideas above about students who excel academically are false. I was always one of them: in 1999 I became the best student at Stuyvesant College in New York and later I graduated from Columbia University with the highest grade in my class … but it was never easy.
To begin with, I always lacked a good oral comprehension, so I often left class with a very poor idea of what the teacher had been explaining, with the need to reread my notes to understand things. Many times I thought I had some difficulty learning, but it seemed silly to do any kind of test when I got one protruding after another.
Learning from real students
In order to write my book I had to investigate, for which I decided to survey more than 45 brilliant students, including students from law and medical schools, academics Rhodes, Goldwater and Fulbright and even a National Spelling Award, To know how they achieve their academic success.
The results gave me a very significant insight into the minds of some of these students: some think that their success is due to their intelligence, but what my studies found was that the hard work, the desire to learn and pressure to self (In that order) are the three real keys to success.
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Hard work
In fact, very few of the students in my survey could be considered as geniuses; On the contrary, they get the results they get because they work much harder than the average. At the University, 67% of them spent more than 20 hours a week studying, while the average of the rest of the students is a dedication of 10 hours a week or less, according to the Institutional Research Cooperative Program of the Research Institute Superior of UCLA.
Sacrifice
About 80% of the students surveyed claimed to have sacrificed much to obtain good results, especially in relation to their social life : many of them stopped spending time with their friends, but is it really bad ? According to Professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, the fact that most college students focus more on their leisure activities than on academic ones is the main reason why they are not so successful because they do not improve In critical thinking or in complex reasoning. I also note that those students who I asked them how they liked to study on a scale of 1 to 10, answered an average of 8.
Support of the family
Another thing to be noted is that 75% of the students I asked for said that they had the support of their families in a positive way, while 18% said they felt pressured by their family with The purpose of getting good grades.
Am I saying that anyone could become a bright student? I would not put it that way, but it is true that academic success is based much more on effort and not so much on talent and intelligence as most people think, something that is important to remember today, when children spend more time on social networks than in front of a book.
Whatever the goals of the students and whatever their successes, we can learn a lot from their sacrifice and their effort.
