- Throughout schooling, we receive awards, acceptances, and generally more respect when
we get good grades. Ad although good grades often times represents a culmination of hard work and
dedication, I'm saying that you shouldn't strive to get perfect grades in college. Look, this video
isn't to tell you all to not try your best, or to fail classes. Instead it's a reminder that
the way you frame a situation in your brain can greatly change the outcome of that given journey.
- In this video I will: - Give my reasons why I
think a lot of times, grades are overrated - What I think everyone should focus on
instead of grades - And finally,
why schools like MIT are very special in my eyes - Make sure to stick around until the end of
the video to hear all of my insights, and huge shoutout to Skillshare for sponsoring
this video. Let's get right into it. - Most can get perfect grades through
high school if they were motivated to do so, and if they worked hard from a
very young age. In the US at least, high school curriculums are fairly universal,
and no matter how much we complain about various teachers or class structures in high school,
A's and B's are usually attainable if you put in the effort. This is why I actually believe that
good grades in high school show more so that a student was disciplined from an early age,
and less so that the specific student has more career potential than their peers. But with how
competitive the college admissions process is, I understand that it becomes another metric that
schools can use to compare two applicants. So if you're in high school trying to apply to a top
university, or if you're in college and trying to apply to a top graduate school of some sorts, good
grades will ultimately matter a lot. But shifting your focus away from the grades themselves could
ultimately allow you to achieve even more. - Learning how to get a perfect score on a
specific test isn't learning how to learn in a way that's applicable to real life.
If you have experience with tests like the SAT and ACT, you'll know that many students
simply learn how to take these specific tests. The students that took more practice exams,
and got taught tips and tricks simply did better. In college, there are definitely lots of classes
where you can just memorize as many practice exam and homework questions, then dump those thoughts
onto tests. I had gotten to be a pretty good test taker throughout the years, but for those tests
where I simply anticipated what was going to be asked, I didn't do myself a service by actually
taking the time to understand the material as much as I could. Memorization doesn't teach you how to
think, whereas understanding various processes and nuances does. In the real world, you'll have tools
like Google, Matlab, and StackOverFlow. But you'll have to understand your specific domain enough in
order to know how to properly utilize those resources to get your work done effectively.
- Another big reason why I think college students should shift their focus away from simply getting
perfect grades is that you need to have a source of motivation that comes from within yourself.
Especially at a school as rigorous as MIT, I've seen many students who seemed to previously use
good grades as a form of motivation and self-validation, who got very down on
themselves when those grades weren't what they expected at MIT. I'm someone of the belief that
if your motivation to work hard comes from an intrinsic place, the good grades will follow.
But if your motivation comes solely from the good grades themselves, it becomes a slippery slope if
there were ever times where you couldn't maintain perfect grades. Your parents won't be receiving a
report card in the mail, and ultimately they won't be able to be there everyday to push you along.
I personally view my loved ones, along with my personal life goals,
as huge sources of motivation. This way, even if I have a particularly rough day, week, or semester,
my sources of motivation never disappear. - Finding your passion is another thing
that is more important to focus on. For the sake of most future endeavors,
having 3 A's and 2 B's in college with a side project and hobby is better than having all A's,
but all you have time to do is study for those classes. Passions are extendable to post-school
careers, whereas unless all of your classes are project based, a lot of them won't be directly
applicable to your career. Having passions outside of academics also helps with that intrinsic
motivation that I just talked about. Progress on your side project or other non-academic activities
can help keep you mentally well as you continue the grind that is college. Passions allow you to
chart your career path around something tangible. Even if your passions are something as broad as an
entire field, like pharmaceuticals or healthcare, simply knowing this allows you to better pave a
path towards a career in that field. In the long run, choosing a career based on it being the most
related to the class that you scored highest on won't always translate to longer term happiness.
However, choosing a career based on it being in a field that you're genuinely passionate
about will have you feeling fulfilled — even on the days where you aren't doing your best.
- If you don't have any current passion in mind, or if you're trying to improve upon current
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- Probably the biggest reason why I think people should shift their focus away from
grades is that focusing on grades leads to unfair comparisons for yourself. Especially in college,
you'll realize that everyone comes from different high schools, had different experiences,
and ultimately led completely different lives than you. So you can already imagine how unhealthy it
would be to use numbers to compare your worth with someone else's. For example, in college,
you may be taking your first physics course, whereas the person across the table from you is
taking his 4th physics class. Both students have to take this specific course to get their degree,
but both students definitely don't have the same prior experiences. Of course if you knew this bit
of information, you may not be as hard on yourself for scoring less than that person on your first
exam. However, you might not always know these things. So in general, try to stray away from
any direct comparisons with peers, especially with regards to grades in any given class. To document
your own growth, I'm still all for using grades as a benchmark on yourself for self-improvement and
understanding, but when you start looking outwards for validation, that's when things can definitely
start getting detrimental to your well-being. - The last topic that I wanted to get into in
this video is why schools like MIT are special in my eyes. MIT's motto is mens et manus,
which is latin for mind and hand. In essence, this expresses MIT's intention of not only teaching the
core theory of any subject, but also allowing the students to get hands-on with projects,
in order to solidify the knowledge. Most majors within MIT have core project classes
that students must take for these reasons. In general, I am a giant advocate for these project
classes where the completion of the project shows your mastery of the course material — as opposed
to some test where you may have just forgot the definition of a term in the stress of test taking.
Project classes definitely prepare you much more for the real world because
they allow you to further understand the core theory in a subject, while still allowing you
to utilize the resources that you would've ultimately been able to use post-graduation.
At MIT, even for non-project classes, a lot of the times exams don't even involve too many numbers.
In these cases, you can have no boxed final answers and still have an opportunity to have
an A. This is because, there are probably many avenues a person could take to solve a problem,
but as long as they show that they understand core principals,
that's all that matters at the end of the day. The test isn't there to test you on your
calculator use, but instead to allow you a way to express your understanding of the course material.
I'm sure MIT isn't the only university setting that allows its students to get more hands-on
with course material, but especially for engineering, I definitely advise students
to get as much hands-on experience as possible in order to solidify your knowledge in that subject.
And when I say hands-on, know that I mean this figuratively, and understand that for
computer scientists, the only thing you're really touching is your keyboard and mouse.
In general, I simply mean that you should get real project experience within your field.
And now being on the other side of the hiring process,
I can definitely say that I would much rather hire someone who didn't do so well academically
but has very solid project experience, over someone who got perfect grades,
but doesn't know how to take a project from conception to completion.
So yeah, don't let your grades define you. Allow yourself the mental space to pursue
your passions and work on cool projects. And put yourself in environments that allow you to do so.
As always, make sure you subscribe and have the
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with me on a more consistent basis. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.