Grades aren’t everything, right?
The Center for Career Development is involved in a lot of senior classes this semester to remind us that it’s okay not be the top student with the highest grades and the most taxing schedule.
I don’t believe them.
Well, let me rephrase that. I certainly think they have a point, but that point simply isn’t for me. That’s what I tell myself every time I sit through yet another pep talk about graduate school and future career options. They keep saying that in five years, no one will ask me about my GPA. This may be true in five years, but right now, I’m constantly reminded that graduate schools are looking at my GPA, my GRE scores, my work experience, and my involvement on campus and in the community. As a senior with a 4.0 at Wesleyan College, this is my confession of exactly how I maintained my grades and how it’s affected the way I define success.
Freshman Year
I graduated high school with a low two-point something GPA. I took AP classes and barely passed a single one. My parents were frustrated with my grades and my teachers described me as lazy and uncommitted. I was not seriously involved in many extracurricular activities, and the ones that I was part of I did not commit to fully. When I got to college, though, something flipped a switch in my head. Perhaps it was the idea that I’d finally study subjects that were more interesting to me, or maybe I matured in the few summer months between high school graduation and my first day of college.
No, honestly, I think I can trace it back to a comment a teacher of mine in high school made when I was failing their class. I was told I’d probably never make it through my first year at Wesleyan with my attitude, and that I was accepted only on the basis that my father was a tenured professor. Oof.
Well, it seems that comment was enough to light a fire beneath me. I declared an English major and an Asian Studies minor within the first two months of my first semester and got to work. I finished my freshman year with all A’s. I hadn’t done that since sixth grade. And it felt damn good.
The First Scratch
My dad once told me that one of his uncles had a rule about getting a new car. Once he bought it, he would take his key and scrape it through the paint right off the bat. Apparently, once you get the first scratch, it’s a little easier to accept small failures or mistakes. By the end of my sophomore year, my parents expressed concerns about my blatant refusal to even consider the possibility of not acing a class. I was at no point under any delusion that this mindset was healthy. I knew throughout the entirety of my sophomore and junior years that I was just driving myself crazy by setting expectations that high for myself.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to expect great things from yourself. The toxicity comes in when you can no longer fathom the idea of not achieving those goals. When simply meeting your own expectations is not enough, you’ve begun to perceive your self-worth as a grade point average.
Enough is Never Enough
By my junior year, I was restless. I hated having any downtime. Even if I was working hard to maintain decent grades, I couldn’t convince myself that I was actually being a good student. If I spent any time pursuing a social life or attempting to maintain an acceptable sleep schedule, I believed that I was falling back into lazy habits. Self-care felt more selfish than it did necessary to my own well-being. So, I took on some work-study hours: one job, two jobs, three jobs, and regular babysitting gigs. I started thinking about life after college. Graduate school was never a question for me, it was a necessity. I started worrying that my resume wasn’t filled with enough participation in on-campus activities or volunteer hours. I started working on filling the hours left in my calendar with club meetings and dance classes, time at the animal shelter, anything I could do to make myself appear the most productive, efficient, involved, compassionate person I could possibly be. And none of it felt good enough.
No one ever told me about imposter syndrome until I sat down in with my dad one day to chat about grad schools. To give a little bit of background, my parents are some of the smartest and most driven people I know. They both earned their Ph.Ds. and are well known in their fields. Growing up, I wanted to be just like them. And it turns out I was on my way- just not in the way I expected.
My dad told me about how in graduate school, he was constantly afraid that he would get “found out.” He believed he wasn’t smart enough to be there and that he would screw it all up one day and get kicked out of his program. And then he laughed, because apparently, “everyone feels that way in graduate school.”
At first, this was comforting. I wasn’t the only one out there with decent credentials and a nagging feeling that I didn’t deserve any of them. But then, I began to get bothered by this idea. Why do we all feel undeserving of our own successes?
I would tell myself it had to be nepotism. Professors only gave me decent grades because they knew my parents well. But I had classes with professors that honestly despised my parents, and I still maintained a 4.0 GPA. I couldn’t take credit for my grades, for my success in work, not even for getting a solo in a dance number. And it was ruining how I looked at myself.
This Year
I am getting ready to graduate college in May 2020. I’m working on graduate school applications, studying for classes, and still being as involved as possible on campus. I haven’t shaken this need to prove myself as the busiest, hardest working, most successful student at Wesleyan. But, I’m finally aware of it. I recognize that these are not good habits or thoughts to have about myself. So, I am practicing every day to see my success and acknowledge it as earned, but to also acknowledge time with friends and self-care as crucial to my mental and physical health rather than as selfish or greedy.
Having good grades is wonderful. I don’t write this to say that the moment you focus on your success as a student you become obsessive and unhealthy. Having a strong sense of your value as a person beyond your status as a student is more important. It’s difficult for me to look into the future five years from now when no one will care about my undergraduate career because right now, people do care. But I am reminding myself that those five years will come and go and being a 4.0 student really won’t matter as much as it does to me now. My feelings and experiences now are valid and are part of that five, ten, twenty-year journey. I just need to remember that I am not my GPA, my GRE scores, or my club involvement.
I am successful, I am a hard worker, and above all, I am deserving.