[dore]

My story:

To the outside person, I usually seem notoriously lazy and just skate through, even though I still seemed to succeed grade-wise. I graduated high school rank 7, which was skewed because I had many less weighted classes due to taking band 8 semesters in block system, but I had good enough grades to beat most people (I was rank 2 behind our eventual valedictorian before the fewer-than-the-rest-of-the-top-ten AP classes really started to kick in). But I got 100%s in classes in which I was asleep half the time, where other people had to work really hard to get A's. A lot of people against whom I competed in high school didn't really like me because it seemed like I was beating them with no effort whatsoever.

I ended up going to a pretty small state school (Appalachian State University) with a full ride. Judging by where the other people in my graduating class went, I probably could have gone to one of the more reputable schools in the region (such as UVA or Duke or whatever), but I went where it was free lol. To a lot of people, they thought I was just being lazy or something, but I really like the school and just didn't want to go anywhere else.

But my desire for underachieving, if you want to call it that, comes from much earlier in school. In elementary/middle school, I was always the smartest kid in the class and I could nearly always answer every question the teacher would ask. But I was also very self-conscious (especially in middle school) and didn't want to be that guy who answers everything, so I would usually not answer. Like many kids, I didn't think being the smart kid was cool, so I always tried to downplay my grades and what not. That kinda led to me not being overly competitive in high school (and I guess in college as well).

So it seemed to other people like I had no work ethic, but I never felt the need to put in a ton of effort when I could get just as good of grades by not putting in any effort and just relying on my natural ability. Obviously, I can't always rely on natural ability, and I have to put in much more effort in college, but that was my story through high school. Had I not been innately intelligent, I never would've had good grades in high school because of the lack of effort I put in.