One Door Closes, Another one Opens

Cuong Nguyen – C01

One door closes, another one opens

Failure is an experience nobody wants, but sometimes it can be really valuable. Failure is memorable because you grow up and change yourself after a failure more than a success. Accepting my failure in the Math Olympiad when I was young helped me to redefine myself to be a humble person and see a suitable path for my career.

When I was at grade 8, I was one of the students with the highest score in math. I got many compliments from my teacher. As a result, I became arrogant and looked my friends down when I got higher score than them. I also became lazy and practiced Math less than I was before. At the end of grade 8, there was a Mathematical Olympiad for students at every school in district 1 to compete with each other. There was around 500 students attended that contest. Once I knew about that Olympiad, I expected myself to achieve the first place. My teachers, my friends, and my parents also expected a lot from me. The day the contest happened, I entered the room with a big confidence that I would get the first prize easily. However, I did badly in that contest. There were familiar problems but lacking of practice made me unable to solve them.

The day I knew the result was the most embarrassment day in my life. I just got the honorable mentioned prize with the lowest score in my school. There were people who I was looked down got higher prize than me. Moreover, someone even laughed at me since I was too arrogant before that contest. My teachers and especially my parents were disappointed. My teachers couldn’t understand why I got such a low score in that contest, and they thought that they have overrated me. My parents and me had a serious talk since they didn’t think that studying math is not a possible path for me in the future anymore. As a consequence of that result, I moved from the Math class to the Computer Science class.

Although moving to the Computer Science class seemed like a back-step, it made a big shift in my life. Because of the similarity with math, I gained interested in computer science quickly and practiced a lot. I became more humble especially with my classmate. I always tried to learn from them when I saw they have a better solution for a problem than mine. Moreover, I was willing to teach or explain to them if they needed me. After a short time, I got the highest score in that Computer Science class. However, I learned from my previous failure that I need to be eager in study, so I never stop practicing. I kept getting better and better. A year later, I got the second prize at the Computer Science contest for students in a whole city. Moreover, I got a chance to intern at Silicon Valley next summer, which would be a big step forward in my career.

The failure at the Mathematical Olympiad gave me many lessons to become a better person. I learned that practice is necessary even though you can be a little bit smarter than other people, and I have to respect everybody and learn from them to improve myself.  Thanks to that failure, I grew up and chose a suitable path for my future, which is becoming a skillful Software Engineer. Failure is not the end but it’s the beginning to something better if you learned to accept and change yourself in order to be a better person.