I Didn’t Get an Award I Wanted, but Failing Gave Me a Necessary Epiphany

I spent the last year of law school trying as hard as I can, partially aiming for an award (magna cum laude) based on a cutoff of GPA. My GPA had to rank in the top 10% of my class for this honor. While a lot of people told me to chill out and relax a bit because I was a third-year law student who already had a job, I was gunning for magna cum laude.

Throughout law school, I was an evening law student who worked during the day as a special education teacher and then went to law school at night. Anyone knows that working in special education is not an easy job at all, and I worked in an urban school district where students had a lot of needs beyond their disabilities. This made my traverse through law school a bit more difficult than most.

I went from a 3.35 GPA after my first year of law school as an evening law student to a 3.84 GPA, getting the highest grade in the class in several of my classes after the first year, including curved, doctrinal (classes every law student has to take), like Contracts and Torts. After my first year, I averaged above a 4.0 GPA based on several highest grades in the class, earning me discretionary A+’s, of which only a few are granted. I spent hours, perhaps, looking at the website of GPA thresholds in past classes to anticipate whether I would get this award.

I did not get the honor.

After working hard for this honor, I agonized a bit — I had improved so much as a law student, and worked so hard. As irrational as it sounds, it felt like all the work was for nothing, and I failed law school.

It felt like I was back at square one, and for a second, I did resolve to always remember this and keep it in the back of my mind when I became an attorney. I felt disappointed in myself, and knew that the biggest thing holding me back from this achievement was my lackluster first year, where I struggled to acclimate to law school and manage the competing responsibilities of law school and my very demanding job in special education.

At the same time, the only person who noticed or cared that I didn’t win this award was me. No one is going to care about the difference between manga cum laude and cum laude (which I did receive), no employer I work for, no friend I have, no professor who spoke wonders about my contributions to their classes. It may have looked nice on my future profile and LinkedIn, but no one would have cared regardless.

And here I was, caring, having a black and white, all or nothing mindset that I was a success if I got this award, that I was a failure if I did not get the award. And I could not blame anyone else but myself.

I improved a lot as a law student and was a great student for the latter 2/3 of my law school experience — no question there. I was recognized by a professor as one of her best students all time in her very long career of teaching. I got the highest grade in two of her classes, and she recognized me at the ceremony for the specialty I pursued in my law school. Another professor said I set an example of the class, and both recognized that I had done all the readings and was always prepared for class.

The reason I did not break into the top 10% was because of my lackluster first year and being an average law student during my first year. If I got almost all A’s for two straight years, there wasn’t much better I could do without being able to do nearly as well as my first year.

I was very, very close. I thought about the times that, if I got an A+ instead of an A, I would have made it. There were classes that if I got an A instead of an A-, I would have made it. If I had gotten B+’s in the class I got B’s in in my worst semester of law school, I would have made it. I came very, very close based on the cutoff for previous years, but could have been the first, second, or third person who didn’t make the cut.

After being pretty upset the first day, I gained perspective and chilled out after that day. I worked really hard and improved so much, and that put me in a position to be a better attorney than even my law school credentials would show. Because I found my way, I know the strategies and have the drive to excel out the gate. I will study extremely hard for the bar exam and leave nothing to chance. I should be proud of that substantial growth, even if I fell short of the particular achievement I wanted. If there were a “most improved” award for law school, I would have come very close to winning it, which would have been a lot more meaningful than any other award.

. . .

I could choose to wallow and be sad about not getting the award I wanted. But I have this somewhat delusional narrative about myself in situations like this — the underdog, the overlooked, the unconventional, the dark horse. I think about all the times when I have felt like I have fallen short or even slighted for accomplishments throughout my life. None of it was ever personal — the times I didn’t get into a college I applied to, the times I didn’t run a time I wanted or didn’t place how I wanted at a meet, the times I was looked over for a job I interviewed or applied for.

Rationally, it made sense why I didn’t get those awards, just like it made sense why I didn’t get this one: I was great and qualified. Other people were just better. There is no bigger, deeper explanation. There is no subjectivity. In terms of GPAs, for this award I wanted, other people were numerically and quantitatively better. If I don’t want this outcome or to feel this way in the future, then I need to be better. When I interviewed at dozens of places and didn’t get a job, this is likely what happened — a number’s game where other people were just better, so it does make me feel better about my job struggles after law school.

At graduation, I saw the names of the people who got the award I was gunning for. I had been in classes with many of them. I recognized all of the students as highly intelligent, very hard-working. They were all students I aspired to be more like and looked up to throughout law school. Many had helped me through various papers. They were more deserving than I, and as much as I wished I could have gotten the same award, I was genuinely happy for them, genuinely happy that I could almost have been in the same league and conversation. They were the stars in each class I was in with them. They were, for lack of a better term, smart as hell and geniuses. I learned I could be smart, hard-working, resilient, but so were so many other people that support me (and hopefully vice versa) who I am constantly pushed by.

. . .

Still, that is just one way I’m looking at it. The other one is a lot healthier. To go from a 3.35 to a 3.84 GPA is somewhat remarkable in the course of two years. Again, I found it very difficult at first to balance law school with my full-time job when I first started. It has been a serious and stressful job. I was responsible for ensuring compliance deadlines were met with special education, but more importantly, that students with disabilities had as good of outcomes as possible.

This would manifest in me completing documents or sending emails at 10 p.m. or 11 p.m., focusing on my job instead of studying because I knew the real world stakes for a child if they did not get their appropriate service or placement. This has played out many, many times over the course of my being in law school, but I have learned that as important and urgent as that work is, I fell into the endless loop of believing everything had to be done now instead of waiting a day to finish tomorrow. Thus, after the first year, I learned how to do law school and focused a lot more on law school while still making my job a big priority.

After the first year, I committed to not make the mistakes I made. First, I did all the readings. When I say all the readings, I mean all the readings, all 100 pages of it a week, sometimes, if that was what was assigned. Of course, I like to think I’m somewhat skilled at triaging what the professor thinks matters more and what doesn’t, but if I was going to go down confused and have no clue what was going on in class, I was going to do it putting in as much effort as possible and swinging. This helped me always know what was going on in class, helped me take copious notes.

Law school is separated into two types of classes. There are exam classes, where your whole grade is how you do on an exam, minus a small portion of the grade that is a participation grade. Even in exam classes, there are classes where the professor assigns a lot of multiple-choice questions, and others where the professor only assigns free response questions where you have to spot the issue. Then there are paper classes, where your whole grade is how you do on a final paper. There are some more nuances in paper classes because some of the grade might be differentiated into presentation and more of the grade is participation. The second and third year classes in law school have more paper classes than exam classes.

I improved a lot because I worked a lot smarter. I learned that whatever the professor said in class was Gospel for purposes of an exam, and I took copious notes where I essentially wrote down everything the professor said. My law school, like many, does open-book exams where you are allowed your notes. We thus create “outlines” as streamlined notes to attack an exam. I did extremely well after my first year because my outlines ran a hundred or more pages. The biggest one ran 350 pages. I learned how to navigate it, and for the really long ones, I even created table of contents so I could scroll through the outline quickly.

This saved me a lot of time, but it is through this copious notetaking and preparation that I changed my performance on exams from average to the top or almost the top of the class each time. Even on exams, some required more precise and brief answers, while some were what I will call “throw everything you can against the wall and see what sticks” kind of exams, where there is a huge time crunch and people barely finish. I was better at the latter. I have the skill of typing a lot very fast, so I could throw in more issues to explain in a three hour exam timespan than a lot of people could. I eventually did get good at the former, too, to be more selective about only including relevant information of what the professor wanted.

For paper classes, I did better than I did in my first year by being more courageous. I would work on the paper every day, even if it was terrible and sucked. Every opportunity the professor gave to see a draft of our papers and give feedback was one I took. In one recent class, I could tell my final paper was disorganized, confusing, and not very strong. But my professor did give three rounds of feedback, and each time, my paper got a lot better after incorporating all of her comments and feedback. I finished with an A paper after what might have been a C or B paper in previous rounds of editing, and I was proud because I worked very hard to edit that paper and make it better. I write a lot, and sometimes, writing can flow and feel effortless on first draft — that paper had none of that feeling of “flow” or effortlessness, and every moment I spent on it was pretty difficult.

In all of my classes, I left nothing to chance. There was always a 10% participation grade, at minimum, in my classes. In my first year of law school, I barely said a word and barely raised my hand. I have no clue what I got on these participation grades, so after that, I decided to raise my hand at least once every class. Of course, once I got the taste of answering the question right once, I sometimes did it multiple times.

As a teacher, I had the gift of knowing how every teacher or professor thinks to some extent. No, the grade is not effort — the student does need to show some proficiency. But you want to see effort and improvement.

I would have classes where the professor asked the whole class a question and there was radio silence for at least 10 seconds. It was incredibly awkward — but I recognized the feeling because it happened to me often as a teacher too, especially when virtual learning was happening during the peak of the pandemic. As a teacher, when you ask a teacher and no one raises their hand to answer, you feel like you’re not engaging your students well, that you’re not teaching the concepts well. I also perfectly understood why students did not want to participate. If you got the answer wrong, among such an intelligent group of people, you feel embarrassed in front of your whole class. This could trigger apprehension and anxiety. Also, there is a culture in law schools where “gunners,” people who dominate class discussion and participate too much, are unpopular and annoying.

Thus, I wanted to not be uncool with my classmates and dominate the conversation of the class, but I also empathized with my professor and wanted to bail them out, even if I was unsure of the answer. I would look around the room if no one raised their hand and then reluctantly raise mine to move the discussion along. I would not always give the professor exactly what they were looking for — sometimes, I was wrong, and the professor would explicitly say, “no, that’s wrong. Anyone else?” Others would try to sugarcoat it and say “well…” and segue into the correct answer. The first time a professor said that, it was uncomfortable and I did get embarrassed, but over time, after being wrong many, many times, I got used to being wrong and it was the best real-time feedback I could have gotten. Plus, class became a lot more enjoyable for me the more I was able to participate and be a part of the class discussion.

Through law school, I learned the skills I would need to be a successful attorney. I needed not only hard work, but substantial preparation, consistently showing up every day, the ability to take critical, constructive feedback to heart and improve, and the ability to muster my absolute best every single day. It was the ability to be wrong and correct any deficiencies in my skills or knowledge in real time. It was the ability to consistently solicit that feedback with my professors. These are all skills I will need as an attorney, and I will endeavor not to just ride high on how smart people think I am, but on how hard I work consistently and how receptive I am to feedback.

. . .

The improvement and growth mattered much more than the result. I had built up magna cum laude in my head as a big deal and a form of external validation I sought for my law school accomplishments and improvement. Because it became such a big deal to me when I didn’t get it, I learned I needed to work on myself, to not seek out the external validation of an award or accolade, but to recognize myself and be confident in myself.

I have always been someone overreliant on that external validation, whether it is recognition from others at work or an award that means very little to no one except myself here. I can be a people pleaser in other areas of my life. The confidence in myself, knowing that I worked really hard, improved a lot, did the best I could, and optimized everything I could control, should be validating enough.

I learned my lessons for the future, and will press on, without the recognition I sought in the award that could have shown up on my resume, but with the knowledge that I did get the most I possibly could have gotten out of my education, not just recognition on my resume.

This disappointment, like many in my life, was a sobering wake-up call. I had gotten prideful and greedy. I forgot gratitude. I didn’t lean enough on my family, relationships, and faith. It gave me the wisdom to realize that if I keep chasing this — the accomplishments, the accolades, the awards, I will never be satisfied, even if I were the best.

I will need something else to find that happiness.

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This post was previously published on Ryan Fan‘s blog.

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