Does poor academic performance in school/college matter to my prospects?

The answer is yes and no. Let me explain.

If you performed poorly in school/college, it could send the following messages:

  • The person may not be hard working — perhaps a little casual
  • The person is not interested in the subject matter
  • The person lacks maturity and is irresponsible
  • The subject of study is not the person’s strength and the person does not understand the subject matter
  • The person does not think it is important to excel in school performance metrics
  • Or there was some event that distracted the person from focusing on studies

All of the above assumptions can hurt your prospects. So in that sense, poor academic performance can hurt your prospects — often short term prospects.

But that said, poor academic performance is not a good indicator of future prospects in a long enough time frame and clearly is unimportant. I often note with interest that many people who were considered poor students in school/ college go on to achieve excellence in a field of their interest and leave classmates who are academic stars far behind in life. For example, a young man may achieve excellence in sports and national honours despite doing poorly in academics at school as a child while his classmate who used to top class exams could be doing a boring job with limited growth prospects. For example, some of the weak students at school who were forced to chose arts for 11th and 12th instead of science may become excellent lawyers, judges, artists, writers etc while the science topper may be in a low profile job (albeit intellectually stimulating job) with limited opportunities to excel and shine. So over a long enough period of time, your school and college performance hardly matters if you do not allow them to matter.

So, if you have done poorly in academics at school or college, do not loose heart. You can do very well in life provided:

  • You find your passion in life and put all your energies into it
  • Identify your strengths and learn to leverage it
  • Make wise choices and do not follow the crowd (especially not the so called academic toppers)
  • Pursue excellence in whatever you are doing

You can remind yourself of the many people who have excelled despite poor academic performance — for ex, Albert Einstein, Sachin Tendulkar and many others.