Why I Won't Be getting Perfect Grades at University

While at community college I pursued perfect grades for one reason––transferring. For me community college represented an extension or more so a second chance at high school. I could once again prove to myself and––most importantly––to college admissions that I would be a successful university student. However, I think that I took this part a little too far and spent too much time pursuing my grades as realistically I would likely have got admitted to the same schools if I had a few B’s on my transcript. In addition, it almost became a point of obsession and worse arrogance for me to pursue perfect grades. Looking back, I think that I could have likely saved myself a lot of difficulty and anxiety if I were to accept that I could get a few B’s and survive. However, having such high grades allowed me to get into the school and program that I had hoped for since entering community college. In the end I think that it was a good use of my time and energy to pursue my academics; however, this will change once I’m at university.

Now that I’ve “made it” I’ve become content with having non perfect grades at university. In fact, I think that it would be a waste of time to pursue my academics above other areas of my life. Unlike community college where my end goal was to transfer to a university, my goal now is to transfer into my career. I think that it would now be a waste of time to pursue my grades above building relationships, projects, and competence in my field. I’m sure that my future employers would prefer for me to have good grades, but that would come at an even greater cost to my actual skills as an employee.

It is important to understand that grades ≠ job and that grades ≠ learning. Now that I’m in university I really want to spend the time to connect with people and build relationships with people because it is something that was difficult and that I frankly ignored during community college. I think that it’s important to understand the importance of meeting people as it’s easy to do in university but will be much harder to do once you get older. In addition, I can work on many new projects and skills that aren’t taught in school but would be much better to learn for the workplace. Though I could spend this time to pursue grades I think that future employers would prefer that I actually spend time working on things in the field than just learning about them in class. That right there is the main problem with getting good grades––they take a lot of time. Sure to pass most classes it’s not that hard but it gets exponentially harder to get to each letter grade especially once you factor in taking multiple classes at the same time. For example, during my last semester I probably spent around 70 hours a week studying––im not the smartest person––to get perfect grades while I could of likely spend 40 hours a week studying to get good grades and 10 hours a week to get decent grades.