Today, grade-point averages make up a huge part of our college lives, but really how important is GPA? 

A good grade-point average means you're a good student. And to a certain degree, it can indicate a student's intelligence. However, it does not indicate a person's skill. When it comes to acquiring a job, experience is (and should be) a hotter commodity than GPA. 

As America has moved from a primary, blue-collar economy to a secondary, white-collar economy, the level of education has skyrocketed. More people in America now are college graduates than decades ago. A simple supply and demand graph can figure out the results of this - an increase in the amount of people with college educations supplied has led to a decrease in quantity demanded. There's a surplus of college graduates - even engineering students. 

Decades ago, college graduates were in high demand because of their education. A college graduate was intelligent - and therefore, it was assumed that they could be taught a new skill and that they could pick it up easily. Fast-forward to the present, that's not the case anymore. 

We all know someone who graduated with a degree and has gone to do something either completely out of their field, or had to drop down to a job that didn't require a college degree at all. Many of these people probably even had GPAs above a 3.0 - shocking, right? 

Wrong. Look at their resume. It's so small that it still includes their high school GPA. It includes that club they joined for 6 weeks in their freshman year just for the free pizza. Honestly, it's a little bit sad. 

Previously, I was a Marketing major that thought business was my path. Growing up in a business environment, I have quite a bit of experience with sales, customer service, and entrepreneurship. As someone who has personally not only worked for his family conducting business, I also interned briefly in high school with Garrick, a corporation that manufactures and supplies lawn products. Their main customer is The Home Depot. I personally had to talk to customers, dispatch trucks, and update their books. Like a job, any mistake I made would lose the company money. I was an 18-year-old senior in high school, yet I felt completely comfortable - my previous experience made me qualified, not my high school GPA. 

When I saw other business majors who had higher GPAs than me because they didn't have a social life or didn't try to gain experience in their field because they were too busy trying to get perfect grades, I got annoyed. But in the back of my mind, I knew my experience would prevail. 

Now, I'm switching my major to English. There's a stigma that comes with majors like English though. People think they're worthless majors. Well, here's some news for you - NO COLLEGE MAJOR IS WORTHLESS. It's what experience you have that counts. My experience with English can be summed up to a link to my blog, which contains all of my journalistic and fictional writing archived and organized in one location. It seems so small, but that link is huge- it does and will contain all previous, current, and future work of mine. I used that link in my application to become a writer for The Odyssey. And I will use it for any and all future writing positions. 

Most employers would prefer have a student who got a 3.0, were heavily involved in student organizations and had plenty of internship experience over a student with a 4.0 and little to no experience to speak of. When discussing this concept with Connor Moorman, a super-senior Engineering major with tons of previous experience, he whole-heartedly agreed. 

"I went to the Engineering job fair, and when I handed my resume out, most of the employers were stunned with my previous experience. I was offered plenty of jobs. I didn't even include my GPA on my resume because I needed to make more room for my experience," Moorman said. "What's crazy though, is that some companies, like GE, told me I had to have at least a 3.5 GPA. I don't, but I'm still doing research for them now at our lab here at OSU." 

To put things in perspective, Connor invented a new type of pigmentation his freshman year of college. Additionally, he recently invented his own equation predicting the hardness of high-entropy alloy metals. If you didn't understand those last two sentences, it's really okay, I hardly do myself. What I do understand, however, is that his experience in research has done more for him in his quest for a career than his GPA. 

I'm not saying go be a bad student and fail all of your classes. What I am saying is that your experience is what will distinguish you from others, and put you on the top of that resume pile. Instead of freaking out about getting all A's, go join a club or two and get some B's. And when you can, try to pick up an internship somewhere. Or do what I do, and make your own job experience. In the end, you'll be happier with yourself for it.