After all, students are only ordinary human being. Other people can expect students to be diligent, cool, smart, hard-working, and whatever-good-terms-imaginable. These expectations kinda make us students sound like demigod, or as they said “People whose hands hold the future of the society”.

But you know us students are not even close to those expectations. In reality, we are suffocated: paying high tuition for years, doing exam at least twice in a term, having difficult quizzes every week, and being all-nighter almost everyday to get the tasks done before deadline is up. That suffocated feeling, for some students, lead to (from the school’s point of view) rebellion acts like skipping classes, rarely showing up in campus, doing something no one knows about, getting border-line GPA , and even dropping out in some cases.

I hear people call these kind of students outcasts. Weirdos. Not fitting in with the norms. You’ve also heard this story a lot.

We students know very well that we don’t do those acts without reason

Everyone of us have different complex situation since we hail from different backgrounds with varying  economical, religious, ethnical , family and life conditions. Even our dreams are different.

The only thing unites us is the fact that sometimes or more, we want to stop and start doing what we think is better suit. Some of us may come from not-so-good financial background, so we need to earn pocket money by working part time. The others may have something big going on, like joining the football club, campus choir, or marching band that takes up much time for practice, or maybe some voluntary activities that consumed the time originally used for studying. Or building startup! We come late for classes, do less homework, not participate in the group presentation, take leave of absence, and study only few hours before exam. People wonder whats wrong with this delinquent student ?

The good news is, we don’t need to regret, as long as we know what we want and how to make us more valued. They say university is like a jungle where we can get lost many times before we find the way out. What kind of lost and the way out, I never have a chance to hear their explanation, so I guess I need to decide on my own. For me, being a diligent student with excellent grades can’t always be considered as “the right way”, and graduating from university is not always called “the way out.”

We talk about life here, and graduating with good grades is not a guarantee for success in the future even though it is a savvy investment and obviously safer bet. Remember Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, don’t you?

Other side of the story tells us that many people use the fact that people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have been successful after skipping classes and even dropping out from university. Some people use already-successful-people’s story to give excuse for their laziness. Sometimes I do that too, if I felt too lazy to get up early or too tired after organizing a campus event. My thought was like, “Alright. I’m quite sure Zuckerberg skip classes too and he has tons of money now. I take him for example” and pull the blanket over my head. I know some of you ever have that thought too (or not?)

 Seems we forget one thing. Gates and Zuckerberg brag their delinquent or rebellious acts after they become successful.

So did Einstein. Steve Jobs. You can name the others. We forget that before their success are acknowledged, people called them “outcast”. People only see the result and hardly understand process. If we tell people now that it’s okay to have bad grades because we have something bigger to pursue, they will just see it as an excuse even if we believe it is not.

The funny thing is no matter how bad and weird we were, as long as we succeed, society will see it as an interesting complement to the main story about how many dollars we can earn in a year. But if we don’t succeed, those days of slacking will be the main culprit to blame.

So the question is, is it really okay if we skip classes? The answer lies in the future. If we turn out successful, of course it doesn’t matter if we opt out or drop out from  college.  If you go by statistics, then you should go to university and do well in it. However, if we don’t, I believe we still have the chance to turn things around.  We always have chance to make the things right. Who knows someday in the future you’ll be the owner of a bigger-than-Apple company? Or a writer of books more popular than Harry Potter?

Only after we’re successful, we can brag these “not-very-good” doings. Hard work is always the key. Following Frank Ocean, work hard in silence and let the success make all the noise. Shall we?