26A

1. This semester, my biggest failure would be time-management. This is normally a skill that I feel I have "mastered", but clearly there are always ways to improve. Normally I am very good at managing the days of the week. I like to do work on Sundays-Fridays. This semester I was taking Finance, Management, Typography, Art History, and Entrepreneurship. Finance is known to be a brutal class, and I was determined to end with a B (which is hard but attainable in finance). Because of this I typically spend Tuesday-Fridays purely doing finance. I would spend Sundays doing work for Art History and Entrepreneurship and then on Mondays I would do Typography and management. This was very hard to justify in my head because all of these classes were equally important to my major/minor, as well as for my development as a person. Sometimes I felt defeated knowing that I spend so much of my time doing Finance when it’s the same amount of "credits" as the rest of my classes, however, I didn’t enjoy it and didn’t feel like I was learning anything useful for my development in human capital as a marketing and art-focused student. However, I had this nagging instinct to put in more work to get a good grade in Finance since it is deemed as "impossible." I wanted to prove my peers and mentors wrong by ending with a B. I have done well in most of my courses and finance, but something I overlooked was my management class. I took its lack of required work as a way to push it off an only study for the exams. This has put me in a position where the highest grade I can get in the class is a B+ if I get a 100 on the final management exam. This is what I consider to be a failure because an A in this class is very feasible if I had spent more time on it. Having an A in this class and a C in finance would equal the same GPA weight as getting a B in both classes. In addition to this, management would've been a more useful class for me to focus on in terms of the knowledge I need for my career path, so I wish I had spent more time on it.
2. I learned that grades are not everything. This semester, especially, I realized that my future is defined by my GPA, but rather my human and social capital. I think it is so important to make friendships and professional relationships while at UF because it can set the path for my future in business. Also acquiring knowledge is not the same as getting a grade. I think this taught me that in the future, I'm going to prioritize classes based on what I think I can really gain as a person from the class, rather than a letter grade. For example, even though Entrepreneurship is traditionally thought of as an "easier" course than Finance, I feel I have learned so much from this class that I can incorporate into my ways of thinking which is beneficial to my everyday life and career. Finance is harder, but I can honestly say I don’t think any of the information will ever be useful for me as a marketing and art-oriented person.
3. During my time in college, I have 100% gained a new outlook on failure. In high school, I was told by my parents that nothing below an A is acceptable (until college, that’s way harder) so I had these values and priorities instilled in me. I have learned that failure is not determined by grades. Getting a B is absolutely okay if I feel I have walked away as a more intelligent person. Failure is apart of living life and taking risks and experience the repercussions. I don’t want to look back and see that I've done everything in life by the book, down to the tee. I want to look back and remember certain things that allowed me to open my mind more. I can't pinpoint exactly how this class changed my outlook on failures, but I don’t think its any coincidence that I've become more open to it. When I say I've gained a new outlook in college, I really mean this current year (sophomore year) because as a freshman I was so overwhelmed and scatterbrained that I did not have time to reflect. I can confidently say I am much more willing to take a risk than I would have last year.