Records

By Omar Samhoury


25-3-2012 

                 Emptiness has been the title representing my life for about a month or so. Being fully submerged in studying in the fall made my life centered around engineering books. Thank God, fruitful was the result yet there was something missing. The high GPA was indeed an indicator of success in both strategy and application, yet it was never a 100% guarantee of it. You see, life doesn’t depend only on studying, for there are many factors yet to be mastered. Studying for a test, a person could score a full grade; nevertheless, this is not necessarily true in the tests of life. It turns out to be that striving for high grades is a double-edged sword. In order to master a course, normally a reasonable amount of time must be given. Now what if the goal was to master courses? Then indeed time could be partitioned among the 6 to achieve it. However, ONLY these courses and the basics for survival (food, sleep, and prayer) get the biggest share of time. At the end of the semester, one observes that it’s true that his recent life style did produce a great outcome, but what does it mean? What is the addition provided by the excellent grades to his life? The answer is the proof of being a hard worker, nothing more and nothing less. For it is unreasonable to believe that he or she who scored less will fail at engineering. Nor is it reasonable to judge any non-engineer as less intelligent. Remember, the smart student is in no way different than any other, for intelligence has many colors! Companies always welcome high grades because they indicate how a hard worker is the employee they are “purchasing”. This engineer would have already sold his life by the time he graduates. Hence the outcome of all this studying was to be an average worker possibly with a relatively high paycheck. But what went wrong in the plan of the supposedly smart student?