Your GPA is important because if you're not willing to apply yourself (It sounds like you're not) then you're not a good investment, no matter how smart you.
On the plus side, once you're in college high school grades don't matter anymore, they want to see your college grades.
My mood just dropped around 43 points.
I can say with all seriousness that I am truly and hopelessly screwed, and dammit people should stop making me think of it.
Alright, so I was one of those "gifted" students in high school that was incredibly lazy and didn't apply himself.
Guess what? We're actually fairly common.
Now, I had all the advanced classes, got D's and C's in most of them for not turning in homework/lab reports/essays, and failed and retook Pre-Calc and Physics. I told myself every year that I would buckle down and be a good student, but I only simply got "less bad" every year. I had an addiction to gaming, purely of my own fault. Not a sort of addiction that needs sympathy or medicine, mind you. Just one that made me choose to play computer games instead of sitting down to work or going to sleep.
I graduated high school with no big achievements other than being the captain of the Academic Team (New-Jersey-wide trivia-contest team) which is no big achievement in itself either. I didn't get enough for most of my AP tests and so I didn't get many college credits at all. I was rejected from almost every college I applied to including the state college which my overachiever peers all used as their backup (Rutgers), and so I now instead go to Hunter College, on my second semester. It's 4-year and very inexpensive, and I feel like I'm dumb when I have to write 4-page papers while my friends have been writing 10-page papers their very first semester. (No offense to those who went or go to Hunter--it is just that I am a scholar and geek (which is a nerd, I guess?), and Hunter is designed for people with jobs and families or otherwise demanding lives).
The addiction to gaming was not the cause of my lack of internal motivation--my lack of internal motivation turned me to gaming. I was aware the entire time that I needed to gain self-motivation, but I couldn't ever get it. Now that I'm out of high school and living in an apartment in Brooklyn (though I live with my busybody dad in a one-room studio with little privacy), I have finally been able to get ahold of myself and do my work for school. It's become much easier for me to make myself work (though I do still procrastinate, just moderately) when I choose the classes I want to learn and operate on my own setting while all my school info is emailed directly to me and my parents are not the ones receiving my own progress reports. My goal now is to keep a high enough GPA so that I can transfer to a school with an engineering program, because I want to be a Computer Engineer.
All those little things in high school don't matter significantly in college, but it does determine which college you use to move your life into its next phase. You want to try to get enough internal motivation just so that you can get into a good college, and then every little thing you do in college determines if you get that degree with enough to be able to get into the career you want to get into--and you'll probably see that the little things in college don't really matter in your job, but they are still important at the time.
I wish I had gotten "it" at the beginning of high school that what I do there really does still affect where I go next which then affects in the big picture where I end up.
My dad's favorite saying is something I
think is out of Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac:
Every drop of water and grain of sand
Makes the mighty ocean and the pleasant land.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9801435 times)