Overcoming the Academic Grade Trap | Dawud Muhammed

For a long time, I was a university student chasing points instead of skills. Here is how graduating from a major national bootcamp completely reframed why I build software.

When I first arrived at the Bahir Dar Institute of Technology (BIT), I fell into a trap that catches thousands of college students: the GPA obsession. I was constantly running after points, memorizing for tests, and living in constant fear of my Cumulative GPA dropping. I valued the grades on the paper far more than the actual engineering skills in my hands.

Then came 2024, the year I joined and graduated from the *Five Million Ethiopian Coders Coding Bootcamp*.

Diving into that intensive environment was the ultimate reality check. The biggest hurdle wasn't just understanding the logic of variables and loops; it was conquering my own fear of failure. In a bootcamp, you can't memorize your way out of a broken script. The compiler doesn't care about your GPA; it only cares if your code works.

After completing the fundamentals, something shifted deeply inside me. I realized that true programming isn't a game you play for corporate money or academic gold stars. It is an instrument for human problem-solving.

I stopped staring at my grade report and started looking around my campus for things that were broken. That single shift transformed me from a passive student into an active builder. I began writing code manually, line by line, to build raw muscle memory and deep comprehension. The pursuit of points was officially over; the pursuit of engineering impact had begun.