If I had a penny for every time I heard about anxiety attacks, tears and mental breakdowns (or for every time I had one myself) over finals, I would not have to work over this holiday break. For the past few weeks, students at universities everywhere have slaved over finals. To translate “finals,” this means taking naps instead of a full night’s sleep, studying for every waking moment and sometimes even forgetting to eat. Why do we do this? Because all the hard work we put into the semester may be meaningless if we do not perform well on our final exams. I don’t know about you, but I still have not recovered. After what we went through, I cannot help but to ask, why do we do this to ourselves?
Let’s break this down…
I believe that one of the largest problems of our generation is the importance we place on grade point averages. We let this number define us and dictate how smart we believe we are. Getting on the dean’s list is a label that we feel separates the “smart” students from the rest of the bunch. This, in turn, fuels our stress to maintain a certain grade point average. However, this could not be any further away from the truth (that's a different story, though).
In addition to the stigma over GPA, what makes up this number is a shame. School these days seems like a never ending cycle of studying information for tests, taking the test and then forgetting everything we have studied. Therefore, in reality we have learned nothing. We condition ourselves to become masters of multiple choice, true and false and “list” based questions. Not to state the obvious, but there are no multiple choice questions in the real world.
Now, for the real question…
How important really is this GPA that we slave over?
Google, one of the top companies to work for, says it themselves: it is about more than GPA. In fact, Laszlo Bock, senior vice president for people operations at Google, can be quoted telling the New York Times that there is no correlation in terms of a high GPA being useful in the hiring process and only a slight correlation when it comes to recent college graduates. He elaborates on this point by stating that “academic environments are artificial environments.” He explains that as college students, we are conditioned to survive in the environment that we are in (our university), but it does not mean that we will succeed in a different environment (the workforce). Although GPA matters in some sense when we are recent graduates, if a company like Google can look past it, so can we.
With all of that being said, I think we need to take a moment to reflect on finals. Personally, I spent endless hours per day studying and stressing only to perform mediocrely on my exams. This result is not only disappointing, but I also believe I wasted way too much time worrying when the result seemed out of my control. Do not get me wrong, it is important to do your best and strive for excellence when it comes to school. All I am saying is: next time finals roll around, do not make yourself sick over what the results may be. Study hard, but remember to sleep, eat, give yourself breaks, and most importantly, breathe. In the grand scheme of things, one day this will not matter anymore.
