Joshua Palarchie
Professor Frazer
EDAD 0855
5 February 2023
What the Best College Students Do Reflection
In Bain’s “What the Best College Students Do”, he discusses many worthwhile pieces of advice
and knowledge through different people’s stories, experiences, and experiments. While there are
many ideas that I will be applying to my life now, the three I will be reflecting on are the ideas
that learning to embrace failure will make you more successful, better understanding yourself
will help you regain control of your life, and you cannot base your self-worth on the grades you
obtain in school.
To begin with, the idea that learning to embrace your failures can make you more successful
seemed like a very foreign concept for me to grasp at first, but after further reading the idea
shifted the way I should view my failures. The example I thought best demonstrated this concept
was Carol Diener’s experiment with two groups of kids solving a set of puzzles. “The children in
Group A, the ones who reacted so poorly to failure, had a fixed view of intelligence while those
in Group B believed that you could expand your smarts with effort. To the first kids, you were
born at a certain level and nothing could change that.” (Bain 107). I often identify myself with
the children in Group A when I fail at either a task, test, or fail to be chosen for a leadership
position. I felt like I had an acquired fixed view of intelligence when it came to leadership
positions because I was getting rejected constantly, so I started thinking I wasn’t good enough
for anything and nothing was going to change that. However, after discovering about the growth
mindset Group B had, I did some introspection and realized that there was a common factor with
every leadership spot I applied for and got an interview for. When it came to the interview I
would freeze, no matter how much preparation I did. I never found or looked for a better way to
handle my nerves to be successful in these situations, so that lack of effort to handle my anxiety
inhibited my ability to fully enact on the growth mindset and that is something I look to improve.
Similarly, understanding how you think and what works best for you can heavily influence the
control you have on who you become and how to improve your abilities. “Creative and critically
thinking people open a conversation with themselves that allows them to understand, control,
and improve their own minds and work.” (Bain 64). I’ve always been an indecisive person in
every aspect of my life and everything that I do. This taught me that control is very important to
have and be able to practice. Utilizing control can be very beneficial academically when it comes
to completing work and staying up to speed. Having control strengthens your mind and in turn
improves your work quality. I will be using this information to take control of my life and have a
solid plan of action to be successful in everything that I do.
Lastly, you should never base your self-worth on how you rank academically in school.
“I have let my marks in school define whether I’ve achieved that goal, then every failing or even
mediocre score becomes a threat to what I think of myself. The more I try, the more nervous I
become, fearful that a single failure will reveal that I’m not a worthy person.” (Bain 167). I have
fallen victim to this kind of thinking my whole life. In school growing up I was always ambitious
and strived for success, yet I never performed as well as my other peers. No, my grades weren’t
bad, but they weren’t as good as everyone else’s, and I would compare myself to others and
question my intelligence despite being told how smart I was. It wasn't until I got to high school
that grades mattered so much more to me because of where they would get me, college. If I had
performed lower than I wanted, then I would stress myself out on how much better I had to do to
make up for the loss. Now that I’m in college, I’m learning more and more every day that while
it should be a priority to do well in all my classes, not doing well all the time is completely fine
and is part of the growing process.
Overall, many of the ideas in Bain’s “What the Best College Students Do”, can be
utilized not only for the remainder of my time here at Temple University, but also for the rest of
my professional career and personal life. Learning to embrace failure, better understanding
yourself, and not basing my self-worth on my grades are the three most important life lessons I
will carry with me.
