Written story produced by Elise Holbrook. Podcast episode produced in collaboration with Drue Stinnett.
Is college made better or worse by being a student that is driven to make all A’s? And, when success in school becomes part of your identity how does failure, or perceived failure affect you?
Whether it’s elementary school or college, we all have a different interpretation of what our best is when it comes to academic success. And for some people, academics just really isn’t their thing.
Me and my friend Drue bonded over our mutual interpretation of what our best is in terms of the pursuit of academic perfection. It’s how our friendship started. For us, our best is getting an A, and putting all of our effort into achieving that goal. Pursuing near perfection in academic performance isn’t a question for us, it is the only way we operate. We have set our standards for ourselves high from years of success before college in the k-12 system. For us, academic achievement has become not only a standard we hold ourselves to, but a part of our personality, a part of who we are as a person.
We’ve come to think of ourselves as “Type A”. But what does that really mean? According to Saul McLeod, a researcher and psychology tutor for The University of Manchester’s Division of Neuroscience & Experimental Psychology and founder of the site Simply Psychology, the Type A/B personality scale is a trait continuum with extremes on each end. Type A is characterized by competitiveness, time urgency, hostility and aggression, and Type B behavior is characterized by being relaxed, patient, and easy going. McLeod notes that Type A behavior was originally discovered by accident by cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, who linked it to coronary heart disease, but it is now conceptualized as a set of behavioral responses known as Type A Behavioral Pattern. McLeod noted validity problems with the study – the sample used for research was all male, and it cannot be determined if the results could be generalized for females, mentioning that other studies on women didn’t show the same major difference between the personality types and heath issues.
While the original study could lack validity and may not relate to the female population, we still find ourselves identifying with some of those personality traits on the Type A/B spectrum, particularly the competitiveness trait. We don’t necessarily strive for success in comparison to others in the usual sense. While we understand that an A is not everyone else’s definition of their best, we know it is not our best and therefore must perform better. We even almost compete with ourselves. C’s are generally thought of as a average grade, with A’s and B’s therefore being above average. But for us, an A is our average. Accepting anything less than that, even a B is unacceptable, we have to do better than that. A B is better than anything below it, but it isn’t what we want to work for or accept.
This past year, I was introduced to Psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth’s TED Talk “Grit: The power of passion and perseverance,” which I identified with a lot. It discusses much of Drue and I’s knack for success, and why our own passion and perseverance, even if perhaps from extreme motivations, leads to our above average academic performance. In the TED Talk, Duckworth describes grit as passion and perseverance for very long-term goals, having stamina, and sticking with your future for years and working hard to make it a reality – living life “like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Through her study of Chicago public schools, published in her book of the same name, Angela found that talent isn’t an indicator of success, grit is.
So while Drue and I don’t necessarily believe that we are the smartest or most talented students, we do have a lot of what Duckworth described as grit. We have a passion and perseverance for our goal – academic achievement – which leads us to our high grades.
But that very same passion and perseverance for success may inversely affect us as well. When we don’t meet our own expectations we are often left feeling bad about ourselves and our performance, even if by other peoples standards we haven’t failed.
Listen to this week’s She Rambles Podcast, where Drue and I discuss our lives as students who experience a lot of anxiety from the pressures for academic achievement that we put on ourselves. How does not meeting our own expectations make us feel? And how does that impact our self worth? Is it even possible to overcome or cope with that complex? The girls discuss their experiences in school throughout their education and how their personalities and expectations have become both a big motivator and a big issue for themselves, including how it impacts their ability to work with others in the education context.
