Mentor Quote – Jelani Creary

“Even if it’s boring, or you think it’s unnecessary, you still need to do it. Otherwise you’ll fail and have to repeat it again. Just pass the first time and get it over with.”

And my Dad was right, I really did just need to get good grades the first time. It’s pretty obvious in hindsight, but honestly I was, and still am a pretty lazy person. The proof is literally right here too, I’m sitting here writing this 15 minutes before it’s due. But essentially, back in high school I let my grades slip up for a while, and was doing poorly in my classes, especially my language and economics classes. It’s not like I’m dumb, in fact I actually am pretty smart, I came from a very good middle school where I was kind of the same, passed the SHSAT and got into Brooklyn Tech pretty easily. My issue was, and still is, that I tend to just be lazy and demotivated in classes I’m completely uninterested in. So a lot of the time i’ll just skip work for those classes, which is how i’ll end up with bad grades. I realized though that this mentality is harmful and I should change it, so I worked hard to make up my economic, art and language credits afterschool in my senior year, and I was able to graduate on time.

I still do keep in mind the words my dad has said, because honestly they’re so true. In life there’ll always be subjects, people, places and things I don’t want to do or interact with, but if i’m required to i’ll have to deal with them. The point is that this experience has taught me more about myself as a person, and I ended up getting a real deep dive into my own psyche. I realized that I might just be acting out because i’m afraid of the future, but also because I miss my mother, god rest her soul, who would be the one to push me to achieve my best and help mentor me. The lessons I learned from the 3 sentences my Dad said to me will honestly be something I live by in the future. I’m also going to do my best to keep up with all of my classes and achieve good grades in order to get my degree and hopefully land a job in my desired field.