breakthesky.neti'll break the sky, for you and i are going nowhere.

10 days. One final paper (already written, but needs to be edited). Three exams. Two shifts at work. Two huge suitcases that need to be packed. One room that needs to be emptied and cleaned. Countless goodbyes.

That’s all that is standing between me, home and this summer.

I can totally do this.

My thoughts are all over the place at the moment, so I’m going to settle with bullet points for this entry.

• It has been 70F without a cloud in the sky all week
  I have been spending every moment possible outdoors, soaking up the sun. I appreciate this weather so much more after the Snowpocalypse and Snowmageddon. It makes having to stay inside and do work that much harder!
• I got accepted to study abroad in Beijing next year
  I got my acceptance letter yesterday! I’m going to be in Beijing next school year, baby! Words cannot describe how excited I am for this opportunity of a lifetime. Can it be September already?
• Mission Detoxify is going superbly
  There’s been some drama among my circle of friends this week, but none of it involves me, either directly or indirectly. Plus, I encountered someone on my list of people to cut out from my life in an effort to rid myself of negatives and I am very proud of the way I handled myself in that situation. I did my best to keep it classy and I definitely succeeded.
• I did well on my midterm papers and exams
  This week, I received all of the exams and papers I worked so hard on prior to spring break. I am very pleased with all of my grades; all I have to do now is keep them up for the rest of the year.
• I have been assigned awesome projects at my internship
  I am going to be assisting with the redesign of the website at my internship as well as working on the content and copy. While this project is still in the initial stages, I am very excited to be able to do something very tangible that I will be able to use to “show for” my work.
• I spent quality time catching up with friends I missed while away on break
  I might allude to all the drama that happens in my group of friends (which, frankly, happens a lot) but they are my friends for a reason. It’s been really nice hanging out with them and catching up this week, especially as the weeks will only get crazier as finals approach.

In high school, I never really bothered doing any of the extra credit my teachers sometimes offered. My grades were always excellent and most of the time, I just couldn’t really be bothered to do it. However, in college, that has changed dramatically.

If my professors offer an extra credit option, I do it. If my professors allow students to edit/revise work and hand in an updated version of the original assignment for an improved grade, I do it. If my professors provide an option that involves anything with boosting a grade, I do it. (This might sound like there are a lot of extra credit options in my classes, but there actually are very few extra credit opportunities. When they do happen, they come in all different shapes and sizes!)

It’s not that my grades are worse in college than they were in high school. On the contrary, my college GPA is higher than my high school GPA. It’s just the fact that there aren’t as many overall points that make up a course grade in college, particularly as classes are run on a semester-based system rather than a year-long one. If, over the course of 15 weeks, a class only has three 60-point tests that comprise your overall grade (so, 180 points total for a college class compared to the hundreds of points for a high school class), extra credit does wonders if one of those three tests has a poor result.

Take what happened in one of my classes today, for example. We received our midterm exams back, and the overall class results were all over the grading scale. There were several 100′s but there were also a handful of failing grades (the lowest score was 25%!). However, my professor had offered an extra-credit option of writing a short essay over break, which I completed. Thank goodness that I did, as the extra credit points saved my current overall class grade from getting walloped by the midterm exam!¹

For the tl;dr crowd: always do the extra credit. It never hurts and it just might save your grade!

1. I did not do poorly on the exam, but my exam grade was lower than my current grade in the class, so the extra credit saved my class grade from dropping any further. [↩]