Graduating Without Honors
Last week I had a nightmare in which I decided to take more classes in college and this ended up lowering my GPA by about 0.32 points. I call it a nightmare because I was so disappointed and sad in the dream. When I woke up, I couldn’t help but re-check my final cumulative GPA to ensure that nothing had lowered it somehow. I was surprised that I would have a dream like this almost two weeks after I had walked across the stage and officially received my bachelor’s degree.
Am I obsessed with grades?
Well, perhaps.
Before college, I was accustomed to always being among the top students in a class/school and was sometimes even the top student overall.
The story of how I started working very hard in school and getting good grades is getting more and more blurry over the years, but the feelings surrounding it are still very clear. I wanted to feel useful. I wanted validation. Over the years, I became defined as a hardworking and high-achieving student. I loved that. I kept studying hard because good grades were my main source of self-esteem and without them, I felt like I was nothing. So perhaps I have been obsessed with grades for a long time. For the sake of my self-esteem.
College was a major turning point. My first semester in college was very tough. I had a schedule that didn’t really work for me, and I picked some classes out of fear rather than genuine interest. Being in a completely new environment probably did not help either. I was miserable. I started skipping class to instead sleep, cry and eat junk food. I ended up getting an F on one of my midterms, and my final grades for that semester were an A, B, C, and D. The D was in my mathematics class. I was extremely disappointed in myself, and I think that was when I lost all the remaining confidence I had when it came to excelling in school. Looking back, I wish I had not hyper-focused on that D and let it define the rest of my college journey in the way that it did.
Perhaps not doing as well as I expected increased my obsession with grades. For the next few years, I made most of my academic choices with a mix of fear and desperation. I had to make sure my GPA didn’t fall any further, but I still wanted to do a major- Statistics- whose basis is a subject I now completely feared(Math). Every start of the semester became a battle of figuring out whether I should drop the major, or find the right balance of statistics classes so that even if I failed, I didn’t fail too hard. It was always stressful. I was always just trying to survive college, rather than enjoying it.
Despite how much of a struggle it was, I made it to the finishing line. On May 23rd, 2022, I officially graduated with a bachelor's in Statistics from a great college, having improved my grades significantly from where I started. A lot of friends and family reminded (and continue to remind) me to be very proud of myself for this accomplishment. Yet, as all my fellow graduates around me kept standing up as their names were read to acknowledge the prizes and honors they had gotten in addition to their degrees, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed in myself.
Why didn’t I do better? What was I doing when my classmates were putting in the work to get these awards?
I felt extremely guilty for feeling this way. Given the privilege of graduating with my bachelor's, I thought that other than happiness the only other feeling I was allowed to feel was gratitude. But I did feel disappointed in myself, and I found myself replaying all the decisions I had made at school. For one, I can acknowledge that after my first semester, I had very low standards for myself. I didn’t try very hard to get A’s because I genuinely didn’t believe I could get them, I was mainly studying to avoid C’s and D’s. I’m also still unsure whether I truly liked what I was studying. I’ve always had other interests that I’ve pushed aside as hobbies — music, writing — but something tells me I would’ve been happier and possibly more successful if I had studied them instead.
I’m unsure how to end this. I don’t really have anything profound to say. I just wanted to write this all down, and perhaps make a point about how it is okay to feel many things at once.
Editor’s* Note on the final paragraph: “this might just be my opinion, but this felt the most raw and honest part of the whole blog piece. The whole thing still gave me a vibe of being restrained and filtered. usually, when I read your work I feel a sense of pain/anguish…”
*Shout out to Akshita for editing my random thoughts.
