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I nearly killed myself in college to get straight A’s. Well, almost straight A’s. I graduated with 37 A’s and 3 B’s for a GPA of 3.921. At the time, I thought I was hot stuff. Now I wonder if it wasn’t a waste of time. Let me explain:

1. No one has ever asked about my GPA.
2. I didn’t sleep.
3. I’ve forgotten 95% of it.
4. I didn’t have time for people.
5. Work experience is more valuable.

-This post content is from Jon Morrow as posted on Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist. His blog is On Moneymaking. Read it’s full content here.

Me: (I didn’t get straight As, but my only C was from study abroad. I too didn’t sleep much, but usually thanks to procrastination, or what I called “learning outside of the classroom”)

What are grades? The subjective and objective opinions of professors usually concerning your work for and within the classroom. Sometimes you get lucky (or not) and the professor considers yourself outside of the classroom in determining a grade. We know why we need them, or at least we think we do. Few other alternatives have been accepted, so why care?

From the day that grades were introduced to me (4th grade), partially the explanation of the “fourth grad slump” I learned about yesterday, I saw them as a personal indicator. Before that, looking back at my younger report cards, I remember thinking the higher the number the better (we used a number system before 4th grade). Those 2s, 3s, and 4s out of 5 always looked good to my younger self, the bigger the better. I still remember being placed on a more advanced track, thus the teacher recognized my ability despite my “poor” performance. It wasn’t until Junior year of high school that I detached grades, for the most part, from a system that was grading me as a person. This was good, but not good for my grades. There was a rebound and grades took on a mixed meaning in college as I learned of learning outside of the classroom as well.

So what is it? Doesn’t everyone learn differently? Many of the students that I am involved with right now spend their life in DSA (Division of Student Affairs), many times at the cost of their school work. Yet, they learn and exhibit extreme skill. There has been a trend in college these days to reincorporate “out of the classroom” experiences into the curriculum. Anything from service-learning, externships, to actual work experience counting as class credit. This was the topic covered while attending a conference in Seattle.

I love this trend.

So I say learn on! Yet as a graduate looking at graduate school, thinking of my career, working full-time, and trying to pursue my own interests while trying to make a difference, I still wonder if those grades represent my ability of thinking to learn or learning to think?

I spent most of last week in Seattle, which is why my posts were so sparse. I was there for both a conference on experiential education and some personal meddling. My significant-other, Gregg, had taken the initiative a few months earlier to begin co-coordinating our conferences. We had one methodology, decide on a city first then conference second. Which of course we mixed up priorities. Then this is where he and I are different. Conference search, for me, meant days online looking at all the options possible. Cities first, then maybe find time to see what conferences were there. Plus I had some ideal, that nagged me during the search, that this was an opportunity to find a conference that had topics that I was really into (I scraped our strategy basically to look for the most perfect option) I’m exhausted all over again just thinking about it, aren’t you? As my list grew, Gregg’s list got smaller and he really was only considering the city because he thought, if someone else is paying why be so concerned. You can start to see a trend.

It might begin to look like I’m heading down the road of dissing the “open-minded-free-spirited” bunch but I am in fact pinning the tail on a much larger donkey. This post is for all of us and all those times when we find that “going with the flow” is really a guise for being indecisive. This causes tension in most everyone because being completely narrow-minded or open-minded isn’t really ideal, yet our society rewards making the most perfect “right” decision but only after being open minded enough to consider every option. We are destined to fail, how can we be both at the same time?

Through my whole process of looking, looking, looking, I exemplified my tendency to wander. While I was looking, Gregg forced us to make some decisions on his ever shortening list. In the end, my tactic led nowhere. City first, conference second had us removing more options from his list. We were left with one, Seattle, which was on both of our lists since the beginning (a slap in the face). Plus the conference was applicable to both of our work positions. I grumbled at the decision.

Part three of all of this was the beginning phases of looking at graduate programs. I thought, wouldn’t it have been better to have chosen an area with more college options? Quite the opposite was true, at least for me. Since the Seattle area didn’t have the plethora of options of say Boston, I was able to satiate my desire to look at all of them. I ended up visiting all applicable programs offered in my broad areas of interest at each of of the institutions.

There is a growing lesson from this. I could over analyze this whole ordeal but I’ll keep the lesson simple. Settle more often. Settling for Seattle led me to find the first graduate program that seemed to take into account all my interests, plus the institution is highly rated. I discovered an article in Psychology Today while in the beautiful Seattle library, just as I was wrapping my own head around this conclusion. Click here and check it out!

Here are some tips they suggest:

How to Make Options Your Allies

You can outfox your evolved emotional makeup.

* God is not in the details: Practice making decisions quickly about small things and routine purchases. Limit the time you spend comparing specs. Build confidence in your “gut” by attending to it.
* Don’t dwell: Refuse to spend too much time regretting a decision or blaming yourself for a poor outcome. Instead learn from your mistakes and determine to do better.
* Keep your expectations realistic: Needing it all is guaranteed to make you unhappy.
* Risk a wrong decision: Fight emotional paralysis by seeing that even making the “wrong” choice is often better than making no choice at all; you still learn through trial and error. It is better to blunder your way through life than to avoid making decisions.
* Don’t look back: Engineer your decisions so that they are binding and irreversible: Force yourself to buy final sale items or draw up a contract with family or friends stating that you will not reverse course on a larger decision.

This whole topic relates right back to a previous entry about focusing your options, specifically regarding those close to you. It seems like although settling has a negative connotation we must settle and focus in order to actually have time to experience something. Play to your evolutionary strong points and keep it simple stupid.