I recently received my exam grades and was shocked to find out that I got C's. I felt confident about my performance, so this news was confusing and disappointing. My teacher mentioned that I have the option to review my exams, but this means my mom will also see them, which is embarrassing for me. I'm struggling to cope with this situation, especially since my school has a special class for top students, and I was part of it for half the year. However, this bimester, I was removed from the class, which was tough for me as I was dealing with mental health issues. During this period, I joined the debate club, a challenging competition that I won, but it came with a cost. I missed a lot of classes, and despite being told that it wouldn't impact my grades, it did. I likely received a C in trigonometry and physics, and I just feel like curling up and crying. Thankfully, these grades probably won't affect my overall GPA, as my country only considers the grades from the last bimester. However, I can't help but feel like garbage.

In the last few days, I've come across multiple posts asking for suggestions or tips and they all end with "Is it impressive for college", "Is it gonna be considered in application", "Do colleges like it", "Which one is more impressive for college" etc etc. Now, just to be clear, I'm not pointing fingers at anyone here. I'm gonna be honest, opening a club, a nonprofit, olympiads etc these things are common, all the things that you can find a "How I did it and how you can too" guide on, they're only impressive if you're willing to put in enough time and outwork everyone to the point where it's hard to replicate what you've done, a kid can open a pack of chips and then give some to the homeless people he sees walking around, do it with a friend, there, that's an organization, that's what your nonprofit is worth if you're doing it for the application but if chinnu opens a nonprofit, he reaches out to collab with people who can actually give him the resources and then delivers this food to areas with scarcity, helping over 1k people who suffered big losses due to flood, that's impressive. There are no replicable passive impressive ecs. If you want something impressive, you have to do what no one else is doing, for example, I'm from Bangladesh, there are only like 3 schools in the entire country here that have AP classes and mine isn't one of them so, me doing 5 APs is not the same as Chinnu doing 5 APs in America. So how do you find these "impressive ecs"? you don't, you don't look for ecs, you find what you love and as long as you progress in that in your own ways, you're guaranteed to find unique opportunities that you otherwise wouldn't have thought of. So please, don't just do it for college, college is only 4 years of studying, if you don't do meaningful things now, after college, your past just becomes void, no one cares what club you opened in highschool, no one remembers who led a 2 day nonprofit with 3 people. Do what you do only if you're gonna remember it.

I live in South America in Perú, and i would like to apply to an Ivy league in the USA but the problem is that the school system is so different. In my country AP classes don't exist, schools don't have a sports team, we don't have clubs or science fair(just one year for ninth grade). I really think my hands are tied right now.🥲