A few days before Christmas, I sat in my apartment scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed as status’ were updated and GPAs were posted. Friends and family boasted of 4.0’s and 3.87’s. My sister even posted her own GPA in our family chat. When I finally summed up the courage to check my grades, I was disappointed. I’d only managed to pull off a 3.489, only .011 short of The Dean’s List goal I’d set for myself at the beginning of the academic year. I felt inferior and inadequate.
My self-esteem plummeted, and despite having one of the best semesters of my academic career, I started questioning my intelligence. “You could have gotten higher grades. Why didn’t you work harder? How have you survived at Houghton? Everyone here is so smart. If I can’t do well in school, how can I survive after college?” I moped around for a few days, throwing myself a pity party, before self-reflection brought me to my senses.
No, I hadn’t made The Dean’s List. However, I’d worked three on-campus jobs, managed the newspaper, never missed a homework deadline, and showed up for nearly every class period. In addition to working harder than I ever had before, I’d finally mastered organization, formed a great work ethic, and grown as an individual. Looking back, the fall semester not only began preparing me for life after graduation, but for the person God wants me to be for the rest of my life. This semester was invaluable, despite my grades not being as great as some of my peers.
As students, it’s easy to wrap our identity and our GPA into one amorphous blob. We spend most of our lives striving to earn a letter on a piece of paper, so it makes sense that if that letter is less than perfect we feel inadequate. We’re told these letters are our golden ticket into life, without them you absolutely cannot succeed. The problem with this, however, is that schools are geared towards a linear way of thinking that only caters to a specific audience of students.
We reflected on this recently in my senior seminar for communication while discussing Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind. In the book Pink discusses the societal shift from a very linear, logical way of thinking (left brained thinking) to a broader, more emotional way of thinking (right brained thinking). Reading this book helped me refine my previous self-reflection, gain insight to who I was at my very core, and aided in my understanding of the people who surround me on a daily basis. If you can’t tell by now, I’m incredibly right brained.
So no, my GPA wasn’t a 4.0. No, I can’t always follow a train of logic until it reaches the station and departs. But I’m passionate about what I believe in, I can look at a project in the beginning phases and see how I want it to look at the end, and I feel so deeply that I sobbed the first time I ran over an animal.
Having a great GPA isn’t a bad thing, in fact I admire people that excel easily in academics. However, we need to learn to value ourselves beyond our GPA, even if that’s what we’re great at. Even if you’re logical and linear in your thinking, you probably have activities you excel in beyond your school work. I have incredibly intelligent, left-brained friends who are compassionate teachers, loyal friends, talented artists, and even wonderful activists. So go on, get that A, but remember: the sum of your grades does not equal your identity.