67
Now I know what you might’ve been thinking when you read that title. I’m here to disappoint you by saying this is not my Gen Z brainrot humor making an appearance. 67 is actually the grade I got on one of my first finals in college.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve set my academic standards incredibly high. My parents never pressured me. My teachers never pressured me. It was always just me, alone, deciding that anything under a 93 was basically a world-ending catastrophe. I was your classic “rarely studied but pulled an A anyway” student up until I started taking AP classes that forced me to learn to study. But that’s a whole other story. Fast forward to the moment I failed my first college final. You could say that Band-Aid was effectively ripped off.
Here’s the kicker. I didn’t fail because I didn’t understand the material. I failed because I got comfortable. I stopped paying attention to the details because I’d convinced myself I already had it handled.
A little context before I get into the full story. I came into college as a neuroscience major and was dead set on becoming an anesthesiologist. Then that dream quickly died because I found out that I got squeamish around needles, which is not exactly the type of person you want sticking you with a needle before surgery. So I did a full 180 into marketing, though I was still finishing out a few leftover STEM courses. Add in a rocky first semester of adjusting to college life, and by the time finals rolled around, I found myself in the freshman frazzle state.
The class was an advanced writing course, fully asynchronous, graded on three papers and a couple of little assignments. I’d done well on every assignment up to that point and told myself this was the one class I didn’t need to worry about. Which, in hindsight, is exactly the moment I should have started worrying.
The final itself was simple enough. I needed to design a digital brochure to complement one of our papers, then write an analysis of it. Mine was about fixing Knoxville’s infrastructure to support better bike lanes and alleviate traffic. I made the brochure in Canva, wrote the analysis, and turned it in feeling pretty good about it.
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The one small, tiny, extremely-easy-to-overlook detail I forgot? A brochure has a front and a back. Digital or not.
As someone now working toward an M.S. in Marketing, I can confirm that front-and-back is something I would not think twice about skipping now. When I opened that feedback, I just sat there in silence for a solid minute, staring at my screen like it might change its mind.
What I know now, looking back, is that I had options. I could’ve emailed my professor, sent over a proper two-sided brochure, and asked if they’d take the revision. Worst case, they say no, but I’ve shown I can own a mistake and fix it. Instead, I did nothing. I just accepted the grade.
Funny enough, the damage was pretty minor. It only knocked me down to an A-, so in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t some academic catastrophe. But it hit differently, because the grade panicked me initially. Weirdly, ended up being one of the most useful 67s of my life.
Here’s what I actually took from it. Grades matter, sure, but they were never supposed to be the whole goal. I’d spent years treating every assignment like it was what held all of my worth, when really the moments that taught me the most were the ones where I messed up and had to figure out why. A perfect transcript wouldn’t have taught me to double-check my work or to stay sharp even when a task feels “easy”.
So now, when something doesn’t go the way I planned, I try to let it roll off instead of spiraling. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because I’ve learned the lesson usually isn’t in the number itself; it’s in whatever made the number happen. A missed detail, a moment of getting too comfortable, a chance to advocate for myself that I let pass by. Those are the things worth paying attention to.
Somewhere between neuroscience and marketing, between a 4.0 mindset and a one-sided brochure, I learned that focusing on the learning rather than the failure matters a lot more than staying perfect. Growth doesn’t care about your GPA. It cares about whether you were paying attention the next time around.
So here’s to the 67 that taught me more than most of my A’s ever did.
