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You Can't Cram for LifeMar 06 '02 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Your 4.0 GPA won't mean a thing if you don't learn how to work steadily to achieve your goals. I was the college student that you love to hate. I could ignore my books and homework until 2 hours before an exam, and still make an easy A on the test. I could do homework for one class while halfway listening to a lecture in another class, and still tell you exactly what the professor had said even though I never took a note. I had a gift, and I grew to depend on it. As easy as things come to me, I should be able to have any career that I want, right? The opposite is really true. Most college professors and high school teachers will tell you that “gifted” students like myself make rotten employees. Students who learned to work for their grades are usually much more successful after school. Of course, there is always the rare individual like Albert Einstein or Bill Gates to disprove the rule, but generally hard work pays off much more than raw intelligence. If you are sitting in some campus computer lab, surfing the net instead of studying, listen to me now. If you want to prepare for a successful life after college, you are going to have to learn some self discipline. For students like me, college teaches the wrong lessons. Success in a typical college course depends on performing well on a few tests. It is possible, if you are bright enough, to slack off the entire semester except for a few hours of intense studying, and be quite successful. Unfortunately, a real job doesn’t work that way. I was fired today. The sad thing is, I was damned good at my job, and I liked doing it. I have a knack for computer programming. I learn things quickly, and I am a whiz at solving problems. My manager depended on me to be able to figure out tough problems, and then teach my coworkers what I had learned. However, like most jobs, my job had some associated drudgery. There were status reports, design documents, and estimates to write. There were memos to respond to, phone calls to answer, and files to organize. Just about any profession has some tasks that are just as bad as college homework. For a long time, I relied on my skills as a programmer to get by. I became the eccentric nerd who was “above” all the paperwork. Amazingly, that ploy actually worked at times, and that just encouraged me to neglect my more boring tasks even more. I think I would have been fine if it had stopped at that. Gradually, I learned that I could do my work faster than other programmers. I could goof off and then “cram” when work was almost due. I thrived on deadlines and pressure. In fact, I needed the pressure to be able to work. In high school, one of my English teachers spoke against the evils of procrastination. She told us about how she put off reading as assigned book in graduate school until the last moment, only to realize that she couldn’t understand it when she finally did start reading it. Instead of getting her doctorate, she dropped out of college and ended up teaching high school. I guess she was a crammer too. My own downfall wasn’t entirely due to my poor work skills, but in the end my cram for finals mentality cost me my job. Last August, my company laid off 10 people, and I panicked. The market was tight, and I didn’t have a lot of work to do. I needed my job because I have four kids and a bad habit of spending every penny that I earn. My fear turned into a bout of clinical depression, and I simply stopped working. Oh, I went to work every day, but I really didn’t do much of anything. I told myself that I had plenty of time, and I would do it when my head was clear again. Unfortunately, my head didn’t clear up, and when I finally tried to do my work, I found that I couldn’t. I was stuck. Normally, a programmer in trouble can turn to their peers for help. I couldn’t. The project was nowhere near done because I had been goofing off, and waiting for the deadline. I couldn’t let anybody see that I wasn’t almost done; so I started lying to cover up the true state of things. Out of desperation, I went to my family doctor, and had him prescribe something to help with the depression. He gave me Paxil, which had a dramatic effect on me. It just wasn’t the effect that I needed. On Paxil, my concentration got worse. I couldn’t even focus long enough to read a chapter in a book, much less solve my programming problems. By the time I got off the Paxil, and on my new medication, it was too late. About two weeks ago, I started a new medication, and I started feeling like me again. But it was too late. I was so behind at work that I was afraid to go in each day. This morning, I went in, and started working with a friend of mine on the code. She didn’t seem to notice how little I had done. It was a good day, and I began to have some hope. It was a false hope. Right around five, my boss came in and said we needed to talk. When the Human Resources Manager walked in, I knew that it was over. I could do that job. I had the skills and the talent to do a damn good job for that company. Instead, I had to endure having my boss and the HR manager carry my possessions out to my car. If you want to survive after college, you must have self-discipline. I don’t care how smart and talented you are, you cannot get by on raw talent alone. Life isn’t about goofing off and then studying like hell to get by. Life, and a career, is about getting the work done and then reaping the rewards. The time to learn that lesson is now, not when somebody is walking you to your car with the contents of your desk in a cardboard box.  |
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