You're crunching for finals. You're praying your professors will grade on a curve, all to be successful academically, but have you ever thought of how you are growing as a person?
Your grades aren't everything. To be honest, I learned the hard way that having an above average GPA can only get you so far when looking for a job. Here are the three biggest things that I noticed regarding why my grades weren't the only thing that mattered.
1: Grades show no shred of your character.
While being able to pay attention and do as you're told are good things to be able to do, having a 4.0 means nothing if you cannot show who you are after that. You can be a wonderful person who lives a full life without being someone who is an academic success. I learned early on that I would rather be happy than stress myself about getting an A in a class I knew that wasn't going to dictate my future. You need to make sure you can create yourself to be the best person you can be before you worry about anything else.
2: Perfect grades does not promise a job.
No one at NASA will care what grade you got in an elective art history class your freshman year of undergraduate work. A movie producer usually isn't going to care about the A you got in Bio 101. What they are going to care about and be looking for is how well you work with a team and who you are as a person.
If it came down between two people that had perfect grades, it's obvious that they would rather hire someone who took the time to explore their hobbies and enriched their lives with more than academic success. Someone who was able to get decent grades as well as keep up with clubs and hobbies is someone who is good at juggling responsibilities, and their time management is on point.
I carried a 3.0 into graduation. That's slightly above average, and it's something that's worth putting on a resume. However, during most of my interviews, the person on the other end of the phone wanted to know more about what I did during my time in school than what I learned in school itself. They didn't seem to care about my grades. It was just a bonus that I was able to keep them up while dividing my time into the other things I kept up with.
3: Sometimes worrying about your grades does more harm than good.
My first few years of undergrad work was when I tried to focus on my grades. I would cram. I would lock myself in my room or the library to get work done, and I was miserable. I was depressed that I wasn't doing things I loved, and I couldn't understand why everyone around me seemed to be so much happier than I was. It took 3 semesters to realize that I needed to take care of myself and let my grades come as naturally as they could.
The only time after that that I stressed to the point of break downs over my academics was on my senior project. There was more than one moment that I figured that if I would have just disappeared somehow that it would be the only way to get through the horrible year that that turned out to be. I only remembered what I wanted out of life and that my grades weren't everything when one of my project advisers pulled me aside and told me that I needed a break.
I re-learned what was okay to stress about, and I figured out what I wanted out of life instead of perfect As. My end goal for college was to graduate with a GPA better than high school, and I did it. It came easy once I figured out how to do it.
You cannot worry about how your grades will dictate your future. The 4.0 means nothing if you cannot demonstrate your skills later on down the line. I had pushed myself so far at one point that I hadn't slept. I hadn't been eating. I hadn't been working on anything but school, and I was depressed. My worry over my grades consumed me so much that I forgot the things that made me happy. It isn't good for your health.
Don't let it happen to you. Take time for yourself. Remember who you are, but most importantly? Don't stress over something that doesn't come naturally to you. You'll only hurt yourself in the long run.
