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WhyICareAboutGrades 13 - 11 Feb 2010 - Main.AmandaBell
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| | After our discussion on Thursday I thought it would be helpful to explain why I care so much about my grades. Grades have caused me a tremendous amount of “fear and anxiety” over the past 14 weeks and I would love to stop caring. I’m hoping that Eben and the rest of the class can lift this mighty weight from my shoulders, but I’m not optimistic that it can be done.
I care about grades because other people care about grades. | | | Also, I think there is a huge difference between whatever significance grades have and how much you care about them. Just because you think an employer will look at them, doesn't mean you need to obsess about it. My opinion about grades is this-- if you just do your best, that is all anyone can ask. If you give it your all and leave it all on the field, then I don't think you need to worry so much about grades, because nothing you could have done would make a difference. If you did your best and maximized your potential, then nothing would have changed the grade you ended up with, so what is there to obsess about? Accept them, and move on. At that point, whatever will be will be, and worrying about the grades won't change them, so what's the point? Like anything else, stressing about something over which you have no control is just wasting energy that could be better used elsewhere.
-- RorySkaggs - 10 Feb 2010 | |
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I would like to re-iterate more coherently what I said in class last week about grades. I am nine years out of school. Based on experience, I don't believe that your grades can possibly matter beyond one to two years after graduation. Getting a job depends on having already been successful at a similar job and on intra-industry political issues surrounding your reputation and who likes you. A person who had straight As in school whose projects fail, who has whatever management considers a bad attitude, and/or offends someone important will not be able to get the jobs s/he wants. A person with terrible grades who gets things done and is liked by at least some influential people will have a lot of mobility and options. Who would ever want to hire the good-grades person when they can have the bad-grades person instead? I have hired people and that is always what we looked at, not grades. Also, people are often hired based on peripheral skills, such as speaking a foreign language or knowing in addition to law a lot about hospital work/TV industry work/whatever is important to the organization you want to work for. Takeaway: next year, take a language class or something else that has nothing to do with law but that will make you stand out from other candidates (and, I hope, that will make you happy).
-- AmandaBell - 11 Feb 2010
PS I would like to add that I really like what Mr. Lerner and everyone else wrote, and that if I had received my first-semester grades back when I was in a situation closer to the one most people here are in, I would have flipped out and probably needed to be sedated or something.
-- AmandaBell - 11 Feb 2010 | | | |
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