When you’re in college, a lot of things happen that matter and maybe they don’t matter as much as you think once you’re out of college.

For some, it’s finding their soulmate and getting married and life will be great after that.

For others, it’s moving out of your parents, joining the greek life, party all year and everything will be great after that.

And for the nerds, all they care about is grades.

I’ve known people who only care about one of these things, I know people who’ve accomplished all three of these things.

Since this is a career advice article, we’ll talk about grades, the metric used to measure someone’s worth whether it’s with your parents, your peers, your professor or your potential job employer.

Classification

In general, there are three types of people who care about grades.

I classify the first group as the people saying “C’s get degrees” Generally, these guys are fine with a 2.0 GPA and either are irresponsibly immature or generally don’t believe their worth is tied into their grades.

The next groups, I guess are B students, who probably try really hard to get grades and when they share that their GPA is like, 3.0, they say “oh you know, grades don’t really matter” but in reality, it sucks cause A students are better than you. I fall in this camp.

And the last group are the 3.5-4.0 crowd. These guys excel either in natural talent or hard work ethic. It seems like natural talent, or the way they retain information is more important than hard work. In general, these guys want a high GPA to prove something to someone. People in this category get very upset when they get a bad grade.

In general, each group has a different viewpoint about grades and I’ve known varying degrees of success in each group. In all groups, there are people who end up being successful in what they study (IE, I have a 4.0 as a food science major and I’m a food scientist) and if they don’t go to their intended major (IE, I have a 4.0 as a food science major and I’m a sales manager for Oracle)

So this begs the question: do grades matter?

The answer is basically, depends what they mean to you.

What do Grades Mean to you?

Throughout elementary school, we have been judged by our performance and have been given a letter (or number) of value to show that we’ve done a good job. This happens all throughout college, and some would argue it happens in the workplace (though I believe it has less importance). With this system in mind, we’ve been trained all of our lives to either obey the value, but some people disobey them.

What’s worse is that through that value, and other values such as SAT, ACT, AP, etc etc etc, your ability to accel needs to be verified through an admission process to allow you to learn with people who think very similarly to you (we call this college).

And then in college, you have to strive for a higher value. Grad school is a bit different, but still a game of getting values to get a reward.

As a kid through college, grades have mattered to me. As stated, I was a B student, someone who thought he wasn’t as smart as the A students and sometimes got jealous that he wasn’t very smart, and ashamed that I couldn’t be that smart. In high school, I hung out with the smart kids, but I was one of the dumbest.

As I progressed through college, I still was a B student. I still compared myself to my peers and I still thought to myself, “why don’t I get this as well as she does?” Yet college gave me a lot more freedom to collaborate and meet with different people.

There was a turning point for me where the grades lost a bit of their value and that was honestly through the product development competitions I did in college.

You could say I got a taste of thinking outside of the box, or dare I say it, entrepreneurship.

The Goal Matters

To break it down, grades only matter for a specific end goal and I’ve split it into 3 paths: graduate school, working, and entrepreneurship.

If you’re trying to go to graduate school, grades matter. Yet to a point. There are plenty of people I know who have advanced degrees with terrible grades in undergraduate and got in because they knew a guy, or they paid the university a lot of money. Some people get in because work paid for them, or whatever.

If you are trying to be a good employee, who wants a stable life with no stress, having the system to get good grades is vital. This is a hard concept to grasp, but the idea is to find out the most stress free way of following directions. If you think about it, a class’ main goal is to follow the instructor’s directions. If you know how to do that, and are aware on how to do work based on a person’s personality or style, then your life’s good to go.

If you are trying to be an entrepreneur, then grades don’t matter. You should just focus on knowing the right people and doing the right projects. If you really care about a subject, then bug that teacher every day until you get to be his TA. If you are going to fail and drop out of college, then I hope you did it on something productive and will succeed in the future.

What frustrates me the most about the people who are adamant about good grades is that once they graduate from college, they kind of fall off. The drive is lost and they become average. I don’t know if the scope of achievement overwhelms them, or they “burn out”. Maybe that’s why I keep on going. Most people who have good grades fall into a narrow comfort zone that they can’t escape because they are too afraid of failing. But maybe that’s ok. Not everyone has the drive to go all out in life. Some would argue having that ambition is a curse. Oh well.