Students everywhere try their best to make themselves better, sometimes to the point of perfection. With this comes a possible cost to mental health.
When we try as hard as we can to get the best grades, test scores or the like, it’s easy to fall victim to these pressures.
Striving for perfection, when it is just a desire to improve, is beneficial to all. This desire to improve in all things, especially a knowledge of the world, is crucial to the success of a young mind.
Unfortunately, this desire is not instilled in students by our system of higher education.
Students are not encouraged to discover what truly makes them driven in life, they are pushed to perfect their grades.
It is as if the secret to success is properly filling out a 500-question form.
I can’t even count how many of my friends were let down upon graduation when they discovered that their degrees meant nothing and the GPA they worked so hard to obtain helped them little in the real world.
The academic system is built to perpetuate itself, training new academics. The system would be better if it were training new human beings.
College should be a time and place for children to become adults, not a task that can be perfected.
This illustrates the danger of grades and the pressure to perform academically.
The danger of this misplaced pressure to perform can have massive psychological consequences.
Many of my friends value their worth as human beings over their academic performance.
When they find themselves in situations without the pressure to be perfect, they felt lost and without purpose.
Some of them moved in with their parents. Some have worked at the DMV or local grocery store.
Some spiraled into depression without a sense of purpose.
Maximizing the number on their transcript was all they knew — which doesn’t matter outside of the classroom.
What happens outside the classroom matters too. It can help you learn even more than what you do in class.
College is a time when people need to learn how to take care of themselves. Gaining a solid work ethic, the only thing I believe grades can teach, is important but there is more to life than work.
We all need to understand this and find a deeper sense of purpose in what we do.
We can’t be perfect so we should fight the negative effects of the pressure to be perfect.
So get out there. Treat yourself. Those grades won’t payoff the cost of perfection.
