Why you should just repeat the class
On paper, I am the Class of 2023. In reality, I graduated in 2024.
I didn't take a gap year. I didn't drop out and come back. I simply attended your favorite college, the University of Sierra Leone, Fourah Bay College, where the academic calendar is sometimes a suggestion rather than a rule. The administration made the decision to shift our graduation date, so we had to wait. We finished our coursework, but we didn’t walk the stage until April of the following year.
We weren’t alone in this administrative limbo. At Njala University, the timeline became so compressed that they once had a "double batch" graduation, with two entirely different sets of classes graduating at the exact same time. Picture the chaos: thousands of students from different years all crossing the finish line at the same time.
In that moment, the distinction of being "early" or "late" completely evaporated.
This experience taught me something profound about the timeline of success, and it’s why I have a controversial piece of advice for anyone struggling in college right now: If you fail, don't quit. Just repeat the class.
There is a strange stigma around repeating a year. Holding students back instills a heavy sense of shame in them. As their peers progress, they perceive themselves as having fallen behind. This feeling is so intense that many choose to drop out entirely rather than face the embarrassment of graduating a year later than planned.
But consider the alternative.
I have a very dear friend who had to repeat her first year. It was difficult, and I’m sure at the moment it felt like a disaster. But in that repeat year, the year she was "supposed" to have passed, she met a new set of people who became her best friends for life. She even found love. She persevered through the remaining years, graduated, and is now working as an engineer making over $500.
Think about the trade-off. If she had quit because of the shame of one year, she wouldn't just be missing the degree. She would be missing the money, the career stability, her best friends, and her partner. She paid one year of her time, and she bought a lifetime of rewards.
You also have to be honest with yourself about why you are quitting.
We hear stories about super-geniuses who drop out of college and build empires. They make it look like the degree is unnecessary. But let's be real: I am not one of those people. And the difficult truth is, maybe you aren't either. Those people are statistical anomalies. Avoid the risk of leaving the race, believing that you are the exception, when you have the opportunity to remain in the race and become the norm.
People often say, "If you don't have a passion for it, don't do it." That sounds lovely, but it ignores reality.
When we were kids, half of my class wanted to be astronauts. But we all know how that story ends; there were no space programs to train us and no companies to hire us. So, some of us settled for the closest thing to space, engineering. We studied hard. We struggled. But as we learned, something shifted. We became masters of the craft. Now, we possess knowledge we cannot unwind and skills we are proud of. We built a passion after we committed to the work.
If you quit now because you don't feel "passionate" or because you failed a year, you are walking away right before the good part happens.
It is the same 365 days. If we could joyfully wait a year for the administration to print our degrees, you could also wait a year to master the material that earns yours. Don't let the calendar trick you into quitting.