<p>I am not sure what to make of the back-and-forth discussion of whether or not someone is a ‘typical Swarthmore student,’ or whether someone can even be a ‘typical Swarthmore student.’ If the issue of whether I am such a creature (if they even exist - I would say that they do not) because I have a high GPA, I guess not? I don’t know - as people say on here, I have no idea what sorts of grades my friends receive, nor do I care. It is true - people do not discuss grades here with any sort of frequency.</p>
<p>If the issue is whether my perfectionist leanings are typical, again I don’t know - I suppose that I come off as a hard worker, but I doubt most people that I know I can be a bit obsessive (or, I hope they don’t anyway!) - so how do I know what runs through other people’s heads when they think about work and grades? Also, just to differentiate things again, I am not a perfectionist about grades - I am ambivalent about my GPA and came to college with the intention of /not/ keeping up the all-A march that was high school. I am a perfectionist about my effort - I never mastered the art of asking for a well-placed extension, nor of how to write a paper at the last minute and cover up half-baked ideas with good prose. It bothers me on a fundamental level to turn something in knowing that I could have worked harder on it and did not. Or, to not understand something as well as I could. And as I have said before, this would bother me anywhere, not just Swarthmore.</p>
<p>Truth be told (this thread is turning weirdly confessional), I can point to the single experience when I decided that working very, very hard was the way to solve my problems - and it was not at Swarthmore! It was a summer language program that was not what I had expected. The short: it felt like high school with the same social hierarchies. And so I responded like I did in high school - I worked really hard and kept my nose in my work, except that this was a profoundly challenging program so when I say I worked hard, I mean it. And I did horribly well. When I went back to Swat in the fall, I just couldn’t get back into the healthier mindset that I had come close to achieving my first year.</p>
<p>The message here is that just because Swarthmore is difficult or because you have been concerned with doing well in school in the past, this does not mean that you will run into problems here! It just means that you should check yourself when you feel yourself slipping back into your old ways (and don’t go to any socially isolating summer language programs, haha).</p>
<p>(Banana: sensationalist or no, I know exactly what you mean about ‘study breaks’ entailing that people are studying when not, eh, breaking. Objectively, you know they aren’t just emerging from their rooms or carrels for 45 minutes a week to eat pizza, but still…(neurotic) what if they are?!? (/neurotic).</p>