When I entered the college three years back, I wondered how life would be like if there’s no race of getting first, scoring more marks and becoming teachers favorite. How would it be like working as a team, sharing your knowledge with others and hence collectively producing good results. But my expectation was fallacious and much to my dismay the only criteria that college was following to judge students performances,was their final exams scores. That doesn’t sound good if you’re a student with department rank somewhere around 40-50, you are not in very good terms with your department teachers, you pretty much suck at all those lengthy derivations which are of no use in real world, or in short more or less you are just like me.
But in these three years I realized there are many leeways associated with “not being a topper” or in top ten for that matter. I chose few subjects(obviously the top 10-15 bookish folks) and observed them for around 40 days. Based on my observations, I concluded that my life(“not being a topper”) is far better than that of toppers. So, I am listing down the top ten reasons why you shouldn’t go for the marathon of cgpa/percentage in the college life:
1) You won’t have any pressure of getting good grades in subsequent exams if you’re not among the toppers. Most of the students who carry on with good cgpa are just afraid of losing their image of being toppers. The additional pressure comes from the responsibility of justifying those grades; whether you know the subject or not.
2) You don’t have to do anything just to impress your teacher. Some of the toppers also try writomaniac tehnique, in which they note down everything in the lecture class even after the teacher’s repeated requests -“No need to write it down, you will find this in book.”
3) College is a place to be explored. You will be
tter do this if you are not in super 10. It’s very difficult to justify it with some arguments but i can give a number of examples to make my point. In some extreme cases, students (toppers :P) don’t even know the name of the other student sitting next to them in the class.
4) You will actually look good. The goodlooks rule is defined separately for boys and girls. Ladies first; their looks are inversely proportional to the percentage of their marks in internal exams. Not external?? Yes, because the worsening of looks by external exams is a short term effect. For boys this rule is redefined as- the marks obtained (again internal ) are directly proportional to the amount of oil on the head and the length(in cms) by which the pant is above waist. Pretty simple?
5) Since I’m a final year student, most of the time there are discussions around me on the campus placements. And I have discovered- why it is so good not to be in top ten. Here’s the reason: If you’re in top ten, the only thing you will look for is PSU, with a constant hope that they’ll offer some seats to general category students. Now suppose if you get the job, then your career growth is already stopped(oh! come on You know how drdo designed missiles constantly fail), and if you don’t get the job , then I’m sure god’ll help you.
6) There are millions of things to remember in the information age we live today. You’ll save reasonable memory space in your brain if you are not in the race of cramming and the topper’s common belief- “i got more i’m better”. That works very well for beggars, not the case with students.
7) You won’t regret that you probably wasted important years of your life studying the things meant for 1980’s students.
8) In college life, people will judge you on the basis of ideas you spread, things you talk about, talent you have, work you do and most important the collections you have whether it’s movies, music, ebooks, software , or or … Well I’m pretty sure you’ll be much better at all these once you are out of top ten league.
9) Once you have passed the college, you have to face the real life challenges. You don’t have to compete with your team mates there just to prove your worth. After all it’s the team’s productivity that matters. You won’t feel any pressure of coming first or second, if you haven’t felt it in college. Remember always- Life is much better when your ass is not on fire.
10) Numerous benefits: More time to spend on other things, an improved brain size to body mass ratio, more gtalk/facebook friends with/without benefits but more importantly with real IDs, movies, music, internet, hang out,or hang over. I can go on but I would like to make an important point here that don’t go by the numbers, check their importance in your life.
Deepak Rana 