Throw in the towel?

Before we go on and say grades are not everything and that they don't matter anymore once you get your first paycheck blah blah, I would just like to comment that there are realities which we still have to face.

We still have to hold back our breaths each time we log onto the school's intranet to check our grades, feel the joy feel the disappointment, dance around the chair or bang table or yell a big F word at your screen which makes u look utterly stupid... and then we do a post-mortem of our performance thru'out the term with all the regretful "if-only-i-had..."

In SMU the drop from one higher grade to a lower grade is almost like jumping off a cliff. The worse thing is you don't die when you hit the bottom. You only can choose to stay down there or try hooking your fingers into the crevices and climb back up again. It's almost unredeemable.

And then you ask yourself, if you've gotten straight B+ in every module and graduated with a 3.3 which is 0.1 point grade from achieving a Cum Laude (honors), does it mean you suck and the best you deserve is only a basic salary? It's analogous to scoring 8 A2s in 'O' Levels and not able to enter the top 5 JCs. It's not really comforting oneself with statistical manipulation of those miserable B-ananas on his transcript. No good means no good, part of it could be explained by grades, part of it by moments of weakness and the rest of it by sheer arse luck.

It's a matter of rethinking a plan and not resigning to getting all the B-ananas. Sitting there waiting for bananas only makes you a monkey. As much as we shouldn't beat ourselves up over our apparently lacklustre performance (which is measured by personal expectations of course), we should stop using the "grades-are-not-everything" pretext to exempt ourselves from reflection and rework, if not we'll continue to fall further.

And the most important thing, I'd say, is we shouldn't resign to it!

~