In high school, I came up with an idea I call the “screw it” semester theory. The idea is that during your high school or college career, you get one semester during which, as long as you pass the classes and time it right, you can say “screw it” to excelling and cut yourself slack without doing too much damage.
I want to point out right off the bat that whether you should take a “screw it” semester and when is heavily dependent upon your situation. If you have scholarships that require you to maintain a certain GPA and your cumulative GPA isn’t already very high, it probably isn’t the best idea. If it’s your senior year and you’re applying for internships and jobs, it’s probably the wrong time. But for some people at some times, the best thing you can do for yourself is to take a semester to say “screw it” and just try to pass.
Perhaps most important in deciding whether to take a “screw it” semester is your motivation. If you go into it for the wrong reasons, a “screw it” semester can turn into a lasting sense of apathy that does more harm than good. To explain exactly what I’m getting at, I think it’s best to explain how I came up with the idea.
I’ve struggled with clinical depression and anxiety since I was 14 years old. During my sophomore year of high school, I had to leave school for weeks at a time on two separate occasions because of my mental illness. My GPA plummeted, and because I based my self-worth on my grades, I felt a lot of shame and hopelessness. The next year, as I started seriously looking into colleges, I realized that my poor performance the previous year hadn’t ruined my chances like I thought it would. Because I’d still been able to pass and it happened when it did, I ended up okay. I didn’t have to constantly push myself to excel to be okay in the end, and cutting myself some slack was better in the long-run, even if my GPA took a hit. Thus, the “screw it” semester theory was born.
The “screw it” semester is not about saying that school is not important or that it’s okay to never put the effort in if you want to graduate. It’s designed to help those of us with a tendency or desire to overachieve manage expectations and well-being. It’s about giving yourself room to focus on getting through a rough patch as efficiently as you can and recognizing that lower overall well-being is not worth lower physical or mental health. There are many more important things than maintaining a high GPA. You can get B’s or C’s or even D’s and still be alright in the end. No matter what grades you get, your value as a human will never be affected, and you can always find a way to be okay.