Honestly, doing well in school was always pretty easy for me. I was one of those kids who never had to study or look at the course material to ace all my classes. However, When I made it to college it was a completely different story. Who knew that they were serious when they said college was a lot harder than high school? Not me… that is for sure. So, now the real question is, what strategies have I used to boost my GPA? What worked and what did not?

Through high school, the only class I struggled with was Trigonometry… I even struggled to spell the word. I had the “pleasure” of taking this class during Covid and due to that, I was quarantined for a whole month during this class and the online version was not cutting it. I did not understand one bit of this class no matter how hard I tried, how much I studied, or how much time I had one-on-one with my teacher. About halfway through the semester, I was ready to give up and fail the class. But I refused to fail a class, so I turned to the one and only YouTube! Now, this method worked for a while to boost my grades on homework… but not so much for exams. Retaining the knowledge was my next goal. To retain the ridiculous amount of knowledge I needed to know for Trig, I simply did as many example problems as possible the night before the exam. Was this the smartest way to do this? Absolutely not. But it worked for the time being, however, I soon learned that this did not work for college.

Onto my struggles I (very quickly) discovered in college… Trigonometry based Physics. Oh, how I thought my life was ending. Now, what was previously stated about my struggle with Trig beforehand translated deeply into this class. I attempted to use the same method before where I did as many practice problems as possible as well as making notecards for each exam. I found that this method did not work at all for this type of material. Trigonometry was hard… but Physics with Trigonometry integrated into it was even harder. What was I going to do? Well, I studied, and practiced, and read the physics book, and I even watched YouTube examples. None of this worked for me as I immediately forgot everything I had just studied and practiced. I soon learned that Physics is a whole lot easier to see in motion than it is on paper. Physics Labs are where I thrived and the only place I did so. So, because I could only understand Physics in action and could only understand the homework because of YouTube, I did not do well in this class ending the semester with a C.

Overall, I have concluded that I did everything to boost my GPA in the areas I was able to do so in by using my resources, practicing, and studying my material. I also concluded that not everyone understands every topic and Trigonometry and Physics just happen to be those topics for me.