It’s the most wonderful time of the year for college students, the few weeks before our winter break that are marked by projects and final exams. As a current junior, this will be my fifth round of finals. At this point, I really should be an expert. But each time finals would roll around, I add so much unnecessary pressure on myself.Â
For me, this is because I am still learning how to manage my relationship with my grades and my need for academic validation. The definition of academic validation is: “the act of relating one’s self-worth to their grades. It is when your identity, happiness, and self-esteem are all tied to your academic achievements. Academic validation is allowing a percentage on an exam, essay, or assignment to have all the power over your self-perception.” For the past 15 years, academic validation has been something I needed every time a grade was posted.Â
I don’t know when it started. Maybe as early as elementary school? I was a good student in elementary school, I would finish assignments fast and teachers would put me in enrichment groups to keep me occupied. I was deemed “a pleasure to have in class” starting as early as age six. Â
Middle school was the same, I was selected for the only honors offerings at the time. I was consistently asked if my work could be saved so that teachers could use it as an example the next year. I was labeled as “one of the smart kids” and I think that label stuck. I remember when I got my first ever C, in my seventh-grade math class. I was about to cry because I had never in my life received a grade so low. This was one of the first instances of not over-achieving, and clearly, I didn’t know how to cope with it.Â
In high school, I was in all honors and AP classes. I maintained my high grades even as the classes became harder and required more work and studying. Maybe this was just my experience, but I felt the group of students I took most of my honors and AP classes with were always in a competition. Some students were better in other subjects than others or had talents beyond school, but that didn’t seem to matter in the classroom, all that mattered was a percentage out of 100 and how you stacked up compared to the others.
I think that’s part of the reason I wanted to go to one of the biggest schools in the country. Once I was enrolled at UCF, I had at least 200 people in my classes, and no one was asking about grades. It was a relief, and I felt that college was a breath of fresh air in the sense that I wasn’t being compared to anyone else.Â
To be clear, there were no teachers or family members that put this pressure on me. It wasn’t that I was coming home and being told I needed to have all A’s, and it wasn’t that my teachers were saying that either. However, I think when you start to perform over and over again at the same level, everyone around you just expects it. I knew people wouldn’t be outright disappointed in me if I wasn’t perfect, but I also felt that the bar for me was always so much higher than for others.
When finals come up I think the collective hyper-focus on grades conjures up all my old ways of thinking. When I was younger, I think I unintentionally made a big part of my identity that I was “one of the smart kids”.Â
“I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere”
-Taylor Swift, This is Me Trying
Knowing what I do now, this finals season I felt myself more relaxed than I had been in previous years because I know now that if I end with a B in a class, the world won’t end. Starting to let go of the academic validation mindset made my studying more manageable and I saw myself taking more much-needed breaks, and doing things to take care of myself first. Yes, we go to college to earn a degree and grades are important for that, but my college experience has also been defined by so many other experiences. I am proud of the residents that I have had the privilege of mentoring this past semester and the community that I was able to build for them. I am proud of the help I was able to give student-athletes in my tutoring job, and I am proud of the campaigns, events, and social media posts my team was able to create for Her Campus. I am so proud and so grateful for my friends in college and being able to celebrate with each other. All of these experiences add to my identity, and these are the aspects that people will remember me for, no one will know 40 years from now what grade I got in finance while I was an undergrad, and that is what I keep reminding myself of.