After the first two weeks at GW, I was scrolling through the Class of 2022 Facebook group when a particular post stuck out to me: a link to a list of the “10 easiest classes at GW” to boost your grade-point average and presumably get into graduate school. It was September and the fact that freshmen, like myself, were already thinking about how they could fortify their GPA for graduate school took me by surprise.
Although the tangible result of college is a degree and potentially a pathway to graduate school, there is much more to college than a fancy piece of paper with your name on it and an accompanying set of numbers. A student’s first semester should be about testing the waters to explore subject areas, hobbies and interests. Achieving high grades is important, but having a perfect 4.0 GPA shouldn’t be the linchpin of the freshman experience – it should be learning about our interests and carving a direction for the future.
Deliberately choosing classes on the sole basis of ease is harmful for many reasons.
In less than a month, undergraduate students will register for classes for the spring semester and with that in mind, students should carefully consider the reason behind their selections.
Deliberately choosing classes on the sole basis of ease is harmful for many reasons. College is a time when students should challenge themselves academically and expand their horizons. Deciding to take a class like Introduction to Psychology, which was the first entry on the “easiest classes” list, only because it’s classified as easy is pointless. By going into a class with the intention of an easy A, students fail to actually learn and are focused solely on a grade.
There’s a reason advisers preach the concept of trying new classes – it’s one of the best ways to find new areas of interest. Testing out new subjects opens up a world of possibilities for new and captivating interests both for personal and professional development.
As first-year college students, freshmen should be focusing on making new friends, learning new things and taking advantage of all of the academic and extracurricular opportunities that GW has to offer while this freedom is available. It’s impossible to truly make the most of our time at GW if college is viewed primarily as a stepping stone to graduate school. This obsession with the next rung on the ladder makes college a means to an end rather than a valuable experience in its own right.
Ample opportunities exist for students to expand their horizons academically. GW has a huge breadth and depth of classes available to students, which means it’s easy to find new academic interests. We’re also privy to the unofficial internship capital of America, given GW’s proximity to Congress, international nongovernmental organizations and major businesses. And on top of all those opportunities, GW has a lot to offer in student organizations focused on many different topics. Students should be taking advantage of these key components of college life to supplement trying new classes, with the end goal of creating or clarifying an overarching academic interest.
Floating along in easy classes isn’t going to teach us how to think critically or solve problems, which is an incredibly important part of college. Not only are these skills a cornerstone of what we should take away from college, but they make up a gamut of crucial capabilities that students need to function as effective individuals after graduation.
In all fairness, choosing easy courses could be warranted in certain situations. If someone had a bad semester or an unusually low grade in a particular class, taking a few easy classes to salvage their GPA is a smart move. And once sophomore and junior year roll around, it makes sense for the focus to shift to the long game and gin up grades for a future career or graduate school while pursuing internships. But this is not a judgment call that students should be confronted with during their first year, and getting into this habit at this early stage can lead to just coasting through college instead of taking advantage of all opportunities.
Registration for spring classes is approaching quickly, and first-year students should resist the urge to tee their GPAs up for careers and graduate school – at least for now.
In high school, we were stuck in a game – taking as many Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes as our schools offered, padding our resumes and joining as many clubs as possible to ensure a group of people sitting around GW’s admissions table would offer us a spot. But we are way past high school and even if we do end up needing to lay the groundwork for graduate school, the first year of college shouldn’t be the time to do it. There’s so much more that students should do first because we won’t necessarily have the time or the opportunity in the future.
The college selection process is taxing and freshmen should give themselves credit for making it through. We just got here, and we should enjoy it for a while before we get worked up about what we’ll do once we leave. Registration for spring classes is approaching quickly, and first-year students should resist the urge to tee their GPAs up for careers and graduate school – at least for now.
Andrew Sugrue, a freshman majoring in political science, is a Hatchet opinions writer.
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