Congratulations, midterm season is officially over! No more fretting over unread chapters, last-minute studying curled up on a couch in Payson Library and almost crying of anxiety minutes before an exam. But that doesn’t mean you should procrastinate on those readings again and wait until the very last minute to start that 10-page research paper. Finals season will be in full swing before you can say “Merry Christmas,” so plan ahead and stay on top of your academics.
Once we’re done taking the first biggest exam of the semester, we tend to put our grades on the back burner and start to think it’s acceptable again to skip as many classes as possible and exchange a night of homework for Netflix marathons with friends. Fight the urge; this isn’t high school anymore, and you’re actually paying for your classes. Every time you decide to skip a class, you’re basically flushing hard-earned money down the toilet.
Working hard and getting good grades is not only the least you could do for your parents, but the least you could do for yourself. Now I don’t mean to say that you are defined by your GPA, but the higher it is, the more doors are open for you.
As human beings, professors would obviously want to prioritize students who actually seem to care about their grades. They might be the ones you go to for a letter of recommendation for a job or an internship, and imagine how much easier it will be to ask them if you paid attention in class, went to office hours and do well on exams.
At a school as small as Pepperdine, it’s not hard to forge a relationship with your professor outside of the classroom setting, and who knows if he or she will play an instrumental role in landing you your first job post-grad? It may be extremely difficult to keep up with schoolwork with temptations left and right, but I promise you, it will all pay off in the end.
Jumping right back into the daily grind of things will also save you from endless all-nighters at the end of the semester. You may think it’s OK to skip a day or two of reading assignments, but once you start skipping, it gets hard to stay on track. The first-semester cycle is then put on repeat and you may find yourself trying to digest a few hundreds pages of reading the night before your final. Save yourself time and precious sleep, and work hard now.
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