I'm not talking about just with men. In school, personal life, professional life...in EVERYTHING!
Freshman year of high school I took Algebra 2. There were three freshmen in my Algebra 2 class, everyone else were upperclassmen. My Algebra 2 teacher was also the MESA (Mathematics, Engineering and Science Achievement) advisor. The other two freshmen in my class were male students. Our teacher recruited the male students into MESA way before me, even though we all had A's in the class. I wasn't recruited until the end of the school year when I surpassed the entire class for the highest A in the class.
Fast forward to junior year and there are 5 juniors in my AP Calculus class (the rest were seniors). I was the only junior female. I was also President of MESA and taking Physics with seniors because I opted out of taking AP Biology with the rest of my friends. For the annual MESA Day, we took exams in our respective math levels to determine the teams. (*I should mention my school was on a track system, so for my track there were only 5 juniors taking AP Calc and the other tracks also had AP Calc classes with juniors.) The top three scores made up the team. I came in second. I outscored the two male students from my Algebra 2 class; neither of them made the team. The other two that made the team were also juniors and from a different track.
Up until the morning of the MESA Day competition, they were trying to talk me into withdrawing from the team, including our advisor. The Calc exam was hard and when I came out of it saying it was hard, they all said I blew it for the team. But then, when my two male teammates came out saying how hard it was, then suddenly it really was hard. We tied for 2nd place.
Math was my favorite subject and I was an A student. I struggled with Geometry in the 8th grade, but I was still one of the 3 A's in the class. And yet, I always had to prove myself. I was always talked down to. I worked my ass off for MESA, recruited from all the tracks, kept MESA going; made sure our legacy continued, but it still wasn't enough. We all took the same Calc exam to make the team, but somehow I wasn't good enough. It wasn't until the end of senior year, just before graduation, that our MESA advisor told me the best thing he did was recruit me into MESA.
Similarly, my Key Club advisor wasn't thrilled I was elected President for my senior year. The entire classroom had yelled out my name during nominations and I ran uncontested. I had attended almost every single event since the end of my freshman year, had gone to two Key Club conventions and even served as a voting delegate for one of them, but our faculty advisor had doubts about me. He thought I had too much on my plate. My predecessor had had too much on her plate and we had lost our standing. But going into my presidency, I had prepared for this. I hand-picked my successor for MESA and as a senior, all of my classes were scaled back. I didn't have a math nor science anymore and half of my classes were electives needed for graduation that I should have taken in previous years but couldn't because of all of my advance academic courses.
Just like my MESA advisor, at the end of the year, as we came back from my last Key Club convention, my advisor told me about his reservations when I was first elected, but that he was proud of me: proud of all the work I had done to put our school back on top in the division and that he knew how hard a time I had but had always taken the high road. (My VP hated me. She had wanted to be president, but didn't run against me and instead made the entire year difficult and did her best to humiliate me as much as possible. I never retaliated. And even though I did all the work, I never presented it that way.) I knew I had won over my faculty advisor when we were preparing for convention and the award nominations forms were released. I was a TA in one of the computer classes and he came in to tell me he wanted to nominate me for outstanding president and for me to fill out the forms. LOL.
And this was high school; where I can easily point the finger to when it started...the breakdown of my confidence.
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