Why It Was Good I Didn't Study Abroad

In my previous story on this lovely blog of mine, I narrated how I was unable to matriculate at a Canadian university in 2006 and how I was rejected by several top American colleges in the three times I applied for admission. The feelings of disappointment that I had when I was rejected by the American colleges still linger in my memory.

Over the last ten years, I have had recurring dreams in my sleep of myself reapplying and enrolling at top American colleges. Last year for instance, I had two such dreams, and I probably had more, only that I managed to remember two after I woke up from my slumbers. That tells of how deeply I desired to study in America, doesn't it?

Instead of forgetting the disappointments and focussing on future achievements, I have to confess that I have at times found myself reflecting on why I was rejected by the American colleges while some of my schoolmates in high school were accepted. (Yes, I had schoolmates in high school who attended such prestigious universities as MIT, UPenn, Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Princeton and West Point. And some of them didn't do so well in their final high school exams as I did in mine.)

To be honest, there were times I felt that those schoolmates who made it to top American colleges got good breaks they didn't deserve while I was denied opportunities that I deserved. (Whoever said life is unfair had a point.) Then there have been other times I thought that I would probably have been accepted by the American colleges if I had a professional counsellor guide me through the applications, a counsellor who understood the ins and outs of the admission process.

Come to think of it, I now firmly believe I didn't deserve to get into the colleges I applied for admission. Why? Because I got average scores in the SAT exams and I did a lot of lying, exaggeration and plagiarism in the essays and recommendation letters I sent to the colleges. Imagine I extracted one recommendation letter from a book on how to get into top American colleges, modified it a bit and then mailed it to the colleges I was applying for admission. I was such a fool.

Besides getting mediocre SAT scores and submitting untruthful essays and recommendation letters, another reason that makes me think I didn't deserve to get into the colleges was the low self-esteem and poor social skills that I had in my late teens and early twenties. Believe me, I used to sometimes feel inadequate and view some people as superior to me, especially those with a white complexion. That low self-esteem affected my social life; I often felt lonely in social gatherings and awkward when striking a conversation with the girls I admired.

Probably as a result of that low self-esteem, I would sometimes make excessive class contributions during school lessons, a habit that I began at Starehe Institute in 2006 and perfected at the University of Nairobi in 2011. One time when I was in Starehe Institute in 2007, a classmate of mine called Kennedy Munene became so pissed off with my excessive chatter during class that he urged me to keep my mouth shut.

Despite my outspokenness during class hours, the truth is that I was not such a brilliant person, if my mediocre SAT scores were anything to go by. It must have been my way of making up for my lack of a healthy self-esteem. And I wonder what would have happened to me if I had taken such foolishness to America. So in a sense, it was good that I didn't study abroad.

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RECOMMENDATION If you've enjoyed the above story on why it was good I didn't study abroad, you might also enjoy another one on "Building Self-esteem" which I wrote sometime back. Just click on that link in blue to dive straight into the story.