I Was Below Average in School Here's What Changed Everything

I scored below 40% in most subjects through my early school years. Not because I wasn't capable but because I was studying the wrong way, for the wrong reasons. The shift that changed everything was surprisingly simple: I stopped studying out of fear and started studying out of curiosity.

The Problem Was Never Intelligence

In school, I was what teachers politely call a "below average" student. Exams were something to survive, not something to learn from. I'd cram formulas the night before, pass the test with whatever I could retain, and forget everything two days later. The cycle repeated every semester.

I wasn't alone. Most of my classmates were doing the same thing. We were all optimizing for marks, not understanding. And the system rewarded that you pass if you can reproduce the right answer, regardless of whether you actually understand why it's right.

The irony? I wasn't bad at thinking. I just wasn't applying any of it to what I was "supposed" to be learning. I could spend hours understanding how a game worked, how a machine worked, how things broke down and got fixed. But open a textbook? Blank.

The Moment the Shift Happened

It wasn't dramatic. There was no single epiphany moment where everything clicked. It was more like a gradual realization that crept up during my first semester of engineering when I encountered programming for the first time.

Java was my first programming language. And for the first time in my academic life, I actually wanted to understand something. Not because it would be on the exam. Because I wanted to know: how does this actually work?

That one question "why?" was the shift. Instead of memorizing syntax, I wanted to understand what a class was. Why objects existed. What the point of inheritance was. I started connecting concepts to the real world, and suddenly information started sticking.

"The moment I stopped asking 'what do I need to memorize?' and started asking 'why does this work this way?' everything changed."

Math Started Making Sense

Here's a specific example. I struggled with matrices in school. They felt abstract, mechanical, pointless. Nobody explained why matrix multiplication mattered. The textbook just showed the procedure.

Then I started building AI projects and encountered matrix operations everywhere. Neural networks are fundamentally matrix operations. Image processing is matrix math. When I finally saw matrices as a way to transform data rotate, scale, project vectors into new spaces the math went from abstract symbols to a powerful tool. I went back and re-read that chapter. It took me 30 minutes to understand what two months of school hadn't taught me.

The content hadn't changed. My relationship to it had.

The System I Built for Myself

Once I understood that curiosity was the engine, I rebuilt how I approached every subject:

• Start with the "why" before the "what." Before reading a chapter, I'd ask: what problem does this concept solve? Why did someone invent it?
• Connect to something real. For every abstract concept, I'd find a real-world application even a rough one. This anchored the information.
• Teach it back. If I couldn't explain a concept to myself in plain language, I didn't actually understand it. I'd explain things out loud just to verify my own understanding.
• Embrace confusion. Instead of giving up when something didn't make sense, I treated confusion as a signal that something interesting was happening not a sign of failure, but a sign that learning was occurring.

How This Applies to AI Engineering

I applied this exact system to every new technology I've learned AWS, Docker, LLMs, RAG pipelines, OpenSearch. Every time I approach a new tool, I start with: what problem was this built to solve? What was broken before it existed?

This approach also made me a better teacher. When I became DSA Lead at Hackslash and mentored 300+ students, I could recognize fear-based learners immediately. They memorized patterns but got lost when the problem changed slightly. The fix was always the same: slow down, ask why, connect to something concrete.

If You're the "Below Average" Student Right Now

Here's what I'd tell my younger self: you're not bad at learning. You might just be learning the wrong thing the wrong way, for the wrong reasons.

Intelligence is not a fixed thing you either have or don't have. It's a direction you point your curiosity. Point it at something that genuinely matters to you not just what's on the syllabus and watch what happens.

I went from below 40% in school to building AI systems that cut token usage by ~99% in production at Idyllic Services. The gap wasn't talent. It was finding the right reason to care.