I’m in a rather foul mood right now, because I feel like my effort is not rewarded enough. Or rather, my effort is misplaced. And it is my fault.

I feel this in university, career and private life. I am not sure what to do about it. In this blog post, I will take about university and why putting effort into it actually sucks.

Here lies my ambition.

This may sound conceited, but I have hit my head on the ceiling a couple of times while in university. There were two reason this happened: One, I did too much and standardized testing did not reward me. And two, I simply did focus on the wrong and very exhausting things without taking into account that my Prof only had a checklist for the basics.

Let’s start with the simpler one, getting full marks and why it actually feels like shit. Imagine you hit 100/100 in a MCQ test. Feels good, right? You got everything. Now imagine you hit 100/100 in a written essay. Suddenly, this does not feel so great. Because you can be sure you spent more effort than necessary to get there. This could easily have been 110/100, but the scale did not allow for this. In addition, the next 10% are always much, much harder to achieve than the previous 10%. Like the old rule, you achieve 80% of success with 20% of the effort, and the last 20% with 80% of effort? Yeah, now imagine going beyond that. One of my Professors actually had a solution to this: He simply awarded 12/10 points because „the essay was just that good“. But this, again, feels strange: Why was this not an option to begin with? And then we run into the original problem…

The other issue, in my opinion, is much worse: Misplaced effort. There have been so many instances where I felt that my work is really, really good and high quality, but it was just not the standardized thing the professor was looking for. „Oh, you did a systematic literature research? Well, you actually did this subset of an SLR, not that. And we were looking for that. Does not matter that yours is 5x more the work and actually delivers interesting results. It was not the one we were looking for.“ Yeaah….

Compliance is more valuable than quality or results.

This actually made me double and triple check and mail and talk to professors just to try to figure out what the hell they want from me.This meta-game to ensure compliance is actual valuable effort on our part as students. Way more than actually being smart or doing hard work. I recommend you get good at playing it. And for your sake, I hope you do not run into this one specific type of professor: One who knows exactly what they want, but will not tell you. In this case, I suggest to just switch courses.

Because in the end, what counts for your job application are your grades.

Speaking of jobs, I will talk about them next time.

In the meantime, remember that education is a marathon and not a sprint. And make sure you are a good boy or girl and comply.