Life Off-Label

My math teacher was right. We do need math, and we will use it a lot in the “real world”. I find myself using math quite often in college, especially toward the end of the semester. I figure out the bare minimum I need to do on the final to achieve each letter grade in my classes. I doubt that’s what my math teacher had in mind though.

We all do it. We tally up the points and see how many more we need for an A, B or C. Or we take our exam averages and weigh them out accordingly. Some classes make things trickier by factoring in our lab grades or adding arbitrary “participation” categories where we have no idea how many points we’ve accumulated. In those cases though, I make sure to give myself hypothetical best-case and worst-case scenarios. Even if the teacher hinted there would be one, I assume no curves. And finally, if you’re anything like me, you add a few points in case your math was a little off.

After all that calculating, and I’m not sure why, but more often than not I find that I’ll need something like a 50 for the lower letter grade and an impossible 128 for the higher letter grade. Sure, there might be a curve, but I’ve never scored 100 on any exam in my college career ever. It’s not gonna happen now. No matter how diligently I study, there’s those few details here and there that I forgot to touch on and I’m always the one who gets tricked on trick questions. So since I’m not going to ace my final, I have to accept that I’ve set myself up right in the middle, in the Land of Schlibbity-5, where the grade I have is the grade I’m going to get and there’s not really anything the final will do about it. It can be a bit discouraging, but on the bright side, I can chill out a little bit. After all, I’ll still get the same PharmD with B’s and C’s as the person who has a 4.0, so might as well not waste time and energy fretting over it. And maybe I’m biased, but I firmly believe people who can balance work and fun make better pharmacists anyway.