The Premise:
When I celebrated my graduation from undergraduate studies here, my father gave me a card which continues to sit at about arm's length from me as I stand at my desk. In the card, he said the congratulatory things that one says in cards; but he also said something that was something of a revelation at the time.
It took a huge amount of hard work, dedication, and sacrifice to accomplish [graduating]
If you are reading this because you, like me, are still in the midst of some course of study, then chances are you have a pretty good view of the hard work, the dedication, and the sacrifice that you have undergone in order to move incrementally toward your goal. Chances are, though, that you are way, way off. It was only in reading this card on the other side of the finish line that the full weight—the utterly incomprehensible magnitude—of what I'd done could hit me full force. If you are currently making your way through school, stop for a moment, take a deep breath, and recognize that you are doing an amazing thing about which you should be incredibly, incredibly proud.
The Setup:
As a non-traditional student—which is the descriptor they saddle you with when you are old, a parent, or working full-time as you go to school
1—you get very keenly used to the sacrifices inherent in this back-to-school process. Most of them are obvious: reading books for fun and watching TV are for people who don't have textbooks, research papers, and lecture videos to pour through; a full night's sleep will be nice, after graduation that is; and a social life that involves people outside of your classes is a special treat that happens every so often.
Some of the sacrifices are less obvious. When you spend anywhere from 5 to 20 hours of each week sitting in a classroom, 40 hours sitting at various desks doing earning a living, and another 20 to 40 hours sitting somewhere studying and doing homework, your health is bound to decline some (and your weight…err…incline some). You might note that your family has learned to shorthand things to you because they know you cannot afford lengthy distractions. You might even feel your mental faculties slip as your mind and body reach the limits of the stresses you are applying to them. When your average week has over one hundred hours of scheduling in it, you reach limits quickly.
The biggest sacrifice, however, was much more subtle than even those. I had to give up perfectionism.
The Point (finally!):
You see, I am currently a 4.0 student trapped in the transcript of a 3.6 student
2. I am capable of near perfection in my work, and for a significant portion of my undergraduate years I did precisely that. My entire life suffered as a result. My health declined rapidly, I wasn't able to spend as much time with my family—and the time I did spend wasn't very *good* time, my performance at work was not up to my standards, and my sleep and socialization was all but nonexistent. Worse still, each successive semester took more and more out of me, so every 4.0 semester became harder to pull off. Every A or A+ took more out of me, every A- or—heaven forbid—B was a catastrophe.
I still remember when it came to a head: My second semester here at U of M-Dearborn, I was in an Engineering Probability and Statistics class, and I made it all the way to the final exam with my A average intact. Without warning, life intervened in the form of several members of my family needing me for various things. They weren't life-or-death things, certainly they were things I could put off, but there they were; and there was my choice: there was no way I could do it all, so what was going to give?
I'm proud to say that I chose my family over school perfection, and got a B- in the class after a particularly abysmal final exam performance. (And this would be a very different sort of story if my choice went another way, eh?)
The (Inevitable) Conclusion:
My sacrifice was acknowledging that, while there is a certain degree of perfectionism required for me to do the best work I'm
reasonably capable of, there is also an unhealthy degree of perfectionism that says “despite the herculean nature of this combination of tasks, I expect that I will accomplish all of these things I am doing perfectly, across the board, without fail.”
The second one smacks of self-flagellation and can quickly lead to self-loathing, depression, and a catastrophic meltdown. I skirted the borders of all three for quite some time. That is not, as they say, a ‘good time.’3
So my largest and most painful sacrifice isn't giving up my social time—I'm something of an introvert anyway, so it is easy to just ignore the fact that I don't see friends enough. It also isn't my waning health that was the hardest to take—although I find myself much happier now that I've taken steps to get that back under control. The big one, the one that eclipses all others, is granting myself permission to merely be excellent rather than perfect. To be an A- or B+ student, a father that can spend a few valuable homework hours playing basketball with the kids, a programmer who can take on an interesting freelance project or two, an instructor who can devote some extra time to his students to make sure they grasp the lesson, and a human who can spend a bit of time visiting with friends or watching television once in a while.
I can just be.
I apologize for such a navel-gazing, long, self-focused, long, not-very-funny, long post…it was a much shorter piece in my head. Now that I've gotten my “putting tons of words down on paper” warm-up done, time to go back to writing term papers and research surveys. Yay?
1 Or, in my case, all of the above, which I presume makes me extra-special-non-traditional…non-traditional-er?…
2 In weird, scary, graduate program numerics, I'm a 9.0 student trapped in the transcript of a 8.0 student
3 Look though you might, you will never see a truck stop restroom stall with the words “for a good time, try self-loathing, depression, and self-abuse!” Well, perhaps in New Jersey :P
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