And I am that douchebag!
I won’t complain at school, but have begun to bitch a little bit to my sister, and to a couple of friends (and now YOU!) about the 92% I got on today’s Chemistry exam. This was Exam #3. Coming up next, is the final exam in mid-December. I need to get an A on that as well.
While a 92% is an A, and I should be very happy with it, I’d hoped for a higher grade. Ah well. It’s better than a B. I needed an A because I messed up on exam 1, and desperately want an A in this class. (In case you didn’t know, Chemistry is my major). This evening’s exam covered titration of weak acids / bases with strong bases / acids. Gibbs free energy, Thermodynamics, etc.
I had an awkward moment after the exam since a lot of the kids taking the exam tomorrow started pressing me to tell them what was on tonight’s exam. In a way, I wouldn’t have wanted to tell them, but I did. I didn’t give actual problems, but mentioned concepts they should study. One guy texted me directly and is not doing well in the class, so I mentioned some things he should study. I do regret giving him my phone number. Overall, I didn’t want to tell anyone anything about the exam tonight, but I felt like I couldn’t say no without being a total dick.
I still have a lab report due in two days, and a calculus exam on wednesday coming up. Hopefully I do well on both those things. This semester is probably one of the last where I’ll enjoy it. Next semester, I have Physics and Calculus II and Organic Chemistry. I’m looking forward to Ochem, but not so much to math and physics.
So, I got an A, but it should have been a 94 or a 96 or a 98! Or why not 100%!?!!!? lol.
Yeah, I’m that douchebag.
Frick. I just spelled “a long passage” as “along passage.” Not excellent at all!
I just wrote kind of along passage about this in my NaNo project. The main characters are really good students, but one of them knows that he can get away with not studying and get a 92 on most of his tests, getting a 100 occasionally without even trying, which is good enough for him. The other could probably do the same, but she puts in hours of extra time on everything because that’s what it takes for her to get that extra 8 percent on a regular basis. It’s the difference, she says, between very good and excellent, and she wants excellence.
There’s nothing wrong with striving for excellence. But yeah: it usually takes a disproportionate amount of effort for those last few percentage points, an effort seemingly expended by only the likes of Tiger Woods and Sarah Chang.
Nothing douchey about excellence. Don’t make apologies for excellence, unless you’re compromising yourself in some way in striving for it.
I feel like I’m not very excellent, which is what’s odd about the whole thing. I’m imagining that most people don’t care what happens in CHEM 162, except for Chem majors, and the odd occurrence of an overall smart student — much like the one who is also in contention for top student. I hope he wins. I can’t really take the pressure, and bombing the first exam makes me think he deserves it more even though that grade got thrown out. Also, I don’t want the attention in a sense.