DURING a weekend of shot gun shooting, fishing from a canoe and miscellaneous brotherhood mayhem, I pondered why, from a utilitarian perspective, my priority at school is studying rather than doing the things I love, such as enjoying camaraderie. Without the distractions of cell phone service or WiFi, sleeping and even thinking clearly seemed so much easier. This sun-drenched environment left me questioning what is so important about the GPA figure, which hung over the weekend and awaited my return to Charlottesville.
Jon Morrow, an alumnus of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, brings up this same concern in a blog post titled "Why I regret getting straight A's in college." The gist of the piece is that the loss of sleep and the time spent alienating people in order to accomplish straight A's in college was not worth the resultant number on a resume, which no employer, family member or friend has ever cared to ask of the author.
Losing sleep and jamming facts into my head before tests have been the two staples of my academic career since the word "onomatopoeia" appeared on a spelling quiz in the fourth grade. Morrow's article resonated with me because I also have questioned the effort I put into learning material that I will probably never use outside of mid-terms. And as Thanksgiving and Finals draw near, I am still left wondering how I should balance family, friends and extra-curriculars with the potential to get straight A's.
One of the fundamental principles of economic thought is the production possibilities frontier (PPF). A common application of the PPF is in questioning allocations time between leisure and work. The takeaway from this graph for me as a college student is that in order to marginally improves my grades, given that I already spends a lot of time studying, I would need to sacrifice a relatively large amount of additional time that could have otherwise been spent socializing.
If you are the type of person that objects to doing half-hearted work, you might see why I am so troubled by Thoreau's motto, "Do what you love." Even excluding schoolwork, I believe that if students were to do what they love and do it to the best of their ability, there would be no time left to sleep. Dr. Louise Chang of WebMD writes that "too little sleep may cause impaired memory or thought processes, depression, [and] decreased immune system response." As such, the common expression "doing one's best" must imply that one has to sacrifice his other activities in order to produce at the optimal level; that is, there is literal maximization of studying without regard for potential health problems.
I refuse to accept this notion that one must balance doing what he loves with doing other things well because I have met people who are able to accomplish both. Although these types of people may claim to get less sleep, they generally sustain their health and upbeat mood. The students who seem to "have it figured out" are actually not super-humans. It seems as though these people have found a "kink" in their personal PPFs where they can output a suitable amount of schoolwork, time socializing and extra-curricular activities.
In the case of these individuals, "doing one's best" is defined as working smartly and optimizing the entire aggregate of activities in which one chooses to participate. Academic performance can be oriented toward an understanding of material that will be presented on the test rather than pure mastery of the subject; forming friendships can become scientific; and participation in the things we love outside of class can be limited not by the University's resources but by the time one has to allocate to that activity.
At this hyper-efficient point, one may have found a suitable balance for meeting the cut-off between an A- and an A, and giving enough time to create friendships by attending required club meetings. Yet this objectifies the things we love to do by imposing standards, thresholds and deadlines on them.
At the University, we have forced ourselves to readjust our interpretation of "doing one's best." No longer is it considered performing to the absolute best of one's ability in one field, but rather matching your allocation of time and participation in the things you love to the "right" proportions. Historically, the students who have discovered the correct proportions for the recipe are considered to be the ones who truly have done their best, and they are rewarded with a room east or west of the Rotunda.
A university should be full of students with varied interests and skills, and together these skills should form our prized diversity. The multiple commitments that "success" demands of us disallow focused pursuits in single areas, leaving us with diverse interests but not a diverse body of students. If during his university days Albert Einstein had focused not only on being the best physicist but also on being the best Honor Committee chair he could be, would he have produced the same significant theories? Probably not, as he would have been forced to perform to standards, rather than doing his absolute best and following his passions.
Thus, as exam season rolls around, I know that being guided by my GPA will certainly cause me to perform only to minimum standards. In the end, I will be left wondering what I could have accomplished if I was free to do things in the manner I saw fit.
Andrew Kouri's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.kouri@cavalierdaily.com.
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