My rather quiet Spring break was interrupted in the middle of the week by a frantic IM message from my friend at Northwestern, a short and excitable Vietnamese girl.

“I NEED HELP WITH MY THESIS!!!” She messaged a link to a portrait. “WHAT DO YOU THINK? HELPHELPHELP!”

“Linh, I’m not in your class,” I pointed out to her. “I’m not even in your university.”

“GAH!” Gah is a noise she actually makes.

“Calm down, it’s not the end of the world.”

“Yes it is! It’s twenty-five percent of my final grade! IT WILL AFFECT MY GPA.”

I think I hit myself on the head at this point.

“Grades aren’t the end of the world, Linh.”

“But my GPA?!”

“Your GPA isn’t that important!” I tried to reason. “I mean, yeah, maybe for med school, but is it more important than say, your hand?”

“….What?”

“Your hand. Like, having your hand is more important than your GPA. If you lost your hand, you’d miss it more than if you got a bad grade.”

If there is such a thing as an awkward pause in an AIM conversation, there was one at this point.

“What are you talking about?”

Before I explain what I am talking about, allow me to give a little exposition. Like over twenty percent of my peers here at Penn, I am Asian-American. I know the stereotype of an Asian teen—oppressed by parents, pressured to do well in school, naturally talented at math. Well, I am no longer entirely clear what the difference is between a derivative and an integral, and the part about my parents is also incorrect. For the first two years of high school, I did not need my parents to pressure me; I accomplished that job just fine on my own.

I decided I wanted to go to Harvard, and that I therefore needed to have the best grades in the hardest classes. I went part-day to a magnet school offering almost exclusively AP classes, so this was a lot to ask of a quiet fourteen-year-old girl. I had to be the best swimmer, the top violinist – I had to pile on the credentials to prove I was worth something. I studied for hours and swam miles and miles and practiced until I could pick the calluses off the tips of my fingers. I developed a reputation as a perfectionist and an overachiever; the titles made me feel fuzzy on the inside.

I was also extremely miserable. If I got what I thought was a low grade on a test I would wallow in the sinking sensation of failure. I was so driven to be smart that I had convinced myself that I was stupid. My parents tried to drive me off this self-destructive path. My father wanted me to take easier classes, my mother wanted me to drop one of the fifteen extracurriculars I was doing. Both were, contrary to popular stereotype, more concerned with my deteriorating psychological happiness than with my academic success. I would shriek at these suggestions to ease off, though. Doing so would have made me a quitter, and Harvard didn’t accept quitters.

And then I became friends with an extremely intelligent girl who did absolutely no homework whatsoever. She would get Ds on calculus tests because she was too busy making a cake for the calculus teacher to do the assigned homework. She was one of the students that teachers loved but didn’t understand, and they all wanted her to just apply herself every once in a while, gosh darn it. But she didn’t care. If she failed a final she wouldn’t collapse to the floor the way I would have, but rather shrug and make another cake. That doesn’t mean she didn’t learn anything. She learned the things she wanted to – they just usually did not apply homework.

Junior year I dyed my hair blue and had a revelation. Harvard was too pretentious for me, and awards and grades weren’t really as important as I had thought they were. I stopped studying so much and started making more cakes and strangely enough, not only was I happier, but all the silly accomplishments I used to care so much about came to me easily. I didn’t end up dealing crack on the gangsta streets of Des Moines, IA; I ended up at Penn, which is vastly superior. My life seemed pretty good.

That is, until I thought five classes would be easy. A few weeks before the midterm flurry before Spring break, I had a homework-related nightmare for three nights in a row.  This horrified me. Having bad dreams about homework is simply stupid. A nightmare about the eventual zombie invasion of Hill College House is a logical, understandable dream. A nightmare about an analytical essay on the sociological aspects of the Super Bowl? That meant I was regressing, turning back into the lonely angry fourteen-year-old. I put down the bulk pack and put on the layers and went for a long walk. I decided that if  schoolwork was going to take over my life, I was going to drop out and start writing plays on a typewriter by a hedge in my backyard like the main character in Rushmore. As I do not own either a typewriter or a hedge, this meant I had to relax.

Whenever I see someone in the throes of GPA angst the way I used to be, I have the overpowering urge to shake them and give them advice like, “Go make a cake!” Having a good work ethic is one thing, but there is a point at which you can invest yourself so much in schoolwork that your very self-worth becomes tied into those tiny little numbers. As an English major, I, of course, do not believe in numbers. I believe in making cakes with friends instead of studying for your Calculus test the next day. I believe in the happiness learning can bring you, but I also believe learning has extremely little to do with the numbers scribbled into the back of blue books by sleep-deprived TAs. And I believe in the importance of having hands.