“How was your day?” “I just got my GPA back.”
It happened. The New Year is here AND so are the grades. Yay. [notice the lack of exclamation]
The Grade Point Averages of roughly 4,500 students hit Blackboard (the online website where we view our grades) across the last days leading up to 2012. When it gives back GPAs, the University of Rochester leaves its students doing one of two things:
There are those students who feel like they deserve more. They feel cheated, like a sunflower planted in the shade. How is it that their actual GPAs did not line up with the mental caricatures they had of their scores? Like a character from one of my favourite childhood films, they are left wanting more. However, asking politely for a higher Grade Point Average is one thing that simply does not sit well with the authorities. It is not done.
Then there are the students who feel like they beat the crap out of all their midterms and finals and were quite pleased to receive their GPAs. They feel on top of the world. Invincible. Confident. They feel like this:
The GPA puts you on one side of the fence. You are either crying at the funeral, or eating cake at the birthday party.
The good thing, though, is that irrespective of your grades, the professors here tend to be mostly friendly and approachable, so you can always go back to them for feedback and suggestions on how to improve or maintain your grade for the next semester. It would be hypocritical of me to say that a bad GPA isn't the end of the world, because we both know that it is. People get bad grades all the time [some people]. What matters is that you are able to move past the bad score and average it out with sky-high scores later.
I actually received this piece of advice after talking with one of the advisors in the Office of Admissions after I got lackluster score on my first calculus midterm.
Thankfully, my GPA allowed me to do some trash-talking of my own. Now I'm enjoying my break and looking forward to the spring semester. I really can't wait. I'm taking a calculus class, Intermediate Microeconomics, Intro to Creative Writing, and a history class on Nigeria since the Islamic Revolution in 1804. Fun fun fun. Giddy as a schoolgirl.
Oh and just so you know, I'm blogging from Lagos, Nigeria, at the moment. Really enjoying getting away from the Rochester cold.