Drawn beyond my comfort zone

Nigerian colleges come in different styles, and if you are in a public university, you are more likely to live independently, that is, without the strict watchful eyes of your parents and the school authorities. Here, every student had the fate of his academics mostly in his own hands.

No doubt, we heard different tales of lecturers and lectures that seemed difficult to scale, and for me, there was a course titled 'Animal Diversity' with code Zly 103; it was a zoology course. Oftentimes, people, especially our seniors, referred to the course as 'failure diversity', whose implication was that many people would fail the course just like what had occurred in previous sets ahead of us. My normal character was to be nonchalant and lackadaisical about academics. I held the belief of doing my best and nothing more or less. Reading was difficult for me; I preferred to gist with friends in and out of class.

Though my nature was to take life with levity, I was not ready to settle down for failure or be a victim of, of course, animal diversity. I was good at calculating things, but reading and maybe cramming were never things I liked. The index course had a different angle; you could easily forget even that which you had crammed, and explaining it to colleagues or seniors was almost useless. The more useless part of the job for those of us in the medical field was that the course would not be relevant to our career yet; it was a compulsory course, and failing it meant carrying over. The course had the ability to steal your attention from other courses, and success in it was not guaranteed. It was a three-unit course, and failing it would affect the overall performance of any student.

Though I was the unserious type among my colleagues, I made up my mind not to fail the course. In fact, I wanted to pass it excellently, and cheating was not even an option if one wanted to. I had some study colleagues, but engaging them in subtopics wasn't helpful. Every man had to decide his fate.

I bought the textbook for that course, and in addition to the notes that infrequently came from the lecturer taking the course, I devoted my time and attention to it like my life depended on it. The whole textbook was marked with red as I tried to underline every statement that seemed to be important. Occasionally, we asked each other questions randomly as regards the topic to measure how well we had been able to digest and assimilate the course. The past questions were not correlating; it seemed the lecturer was always able to manufacture new questions from the textbook. It was surprising to see me move about with the course's textbook, as I was determined to be among those that passed, not necessarily topped the course.

source

The examination itself was diverse and difficult, as only a few people could resonate with one another about the questions and answers. The slogan was 'let my people go' as it seemed we were mostly content with satisfactory. Thankfully, I had a score of 71, which was a narrow escape into 'A'. It didn't matter if it was a weak A for me; what was important was that I passed and did that well. There were many failures, as expected, and a few of my colleagues had it as a carryover. The nostalgia of the times we struggled with that course remains fresh in my mind.

---

Thank you for reading. I would love to have your comments and contributions.