GPA is definitely an important aspect of university education, as it helps you get into good graduate schools or land a good job offer, but the important thing to understand is the difference between a good GPA and a perfect GPA. Are you willing to give up everything in life to have a perfect GPA or are ready to have a little bit of fun in life and have a good GPA? Of course, there are people whom you have seen having fun and get a perfect GPA. We will see what they are good at and you aren’t.

I don’t mean to put anyone down with a perfect GPA in college, as I know the amount of hard work and sacrifice it takes to get one over a long period of time. I couldn’t do it myself. But for the people with a good enough GPA, I can only say two things: (a) If you think you could have done much better than you did this time, next time you might get a perfect GPA (b) If you can make peace with yourself that your GPA is great and you want to spend the semester the way you spent your last one, keep doing what you are doing and the mental satisfaction that you have now is all you need.

The worst thing that I have seen college students (like myself) do is “plan their GPA." It goes something like this, “if I get a GPA above 3.9 the next semester then my overall GPA would go over 3.7”. This is something I don’t understand and don’t like because GPA is not something you plan. What you should plan is to learn something new and actually remember those stuff over the next few years or at least a few semesters. Plan your knowledge, not your GPA. Plan what you want to learn and how it will help you rather than thinking that you need to get a 3.9 or 4.0 on your transcript.

Now let’s talk about those people whom you have seen having fun around you but have a perfect or an excellent GPA. What is it that they are doing and you aren’t? Let’s talk about a blog article I read some time back but unfortunately, I don’t remember the source. There was a girl who would be seen at most social events but also had a perfect GPA. A friend of her wanted her to go somewhere with her and he asked her to accompany him. She asked him to wait for a second, took her mobile phone out, checked her “schedule” and said yes. She could have said “no." There are two main takeaways from this. First is having a schedule and to follow it. Everyone has a schedule but most of don’t follow it anyway. Second is saying no. If you say yes to everything, of course you won’t have time for yourself. It’s that simple.

Something similar happened to me when I was in my undergraduate. I changed universities after my first year of college, and that messed up my GPA, as I had to take extra courses in which I didn’t fare well and GPA dropped from 8.5/10 to about 7.5/10. I cried for about half an hour. Anything below 8.0 was a blow to myself. Then I planned my GPA. I was so concerned with my GPA that I didn’t really learn a lot one semester and also got an average GPA. Then I understood my mistake and I convinced myself that the only thing that I could do was to do really well in the next semesters and be happy with whatever I get. I learned a lot and also got good enough GPA to keep myself happy and was pretty satisfied by the time I got out. And fortunately, the University of Minnesota was kind enough to let me study here.