Speaker 1: All right hi guys welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new. My name is Anna Pike and today I wanted to talk about how I went from a 2.9 GPA to a 4.0 GPA in college. So I just graduated from Michigan State University a few weeks ago and I was just thinking and reflecting back to my college career and some of the decisions that I made some were good and some were not so good although I don't regret anything that I did in my college career but I thought that this would be a useful video for a lot of people because it's one thing to be naturally smart and have 4.0s your whole entire time in school but it's another thing to not do so well or maybe your head wasn't in the right place and you weren't really focusing on school or you're just not naturally smart and trying to kind of bounce back from that and find resilience to keep going and to do better. That being said things that I'm gonna go over today have worked for me and I'll kind of go into my background and what led me to where I am today but like I said like I'm not a professional in this I'm not like an academic advisor some of these may not be useful to you this is what worked for me. So I just want to start off there are no shortcuts when it comes to getting good grades in school and doing well especially in the more difficult classes. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication I'm sure a lot of you already know that. There are ways you can work smarter and not harder. So I kind of just want to get into my background a little bit. I graduated high school in 2016. I was a fairly smart student I had A's a couple of B's but mainly A's and then I went off to college at Northern Michigan University. That was a very very big transition for me and it was very far away from my home and I really loved that experience but it definitely taught me a lot of lessons that I don't want to repeat later on in life. So I went to Northern Michigan University to study nursing and I believe I've touched on this in my pre-PA journey video that first semester of college I was going out a lot I was living in the dorms I didn't really know what I wanted to do I was really far away from home. That first semester of college I ended up with a 2.94 GPA and that is not good enough to get into nursing school and it's definitely not good enough to get into PA school. I was like really mad at myself and I was also just going through a lot of other things like I gained the freshman 15. I just felt like you know I my priorities were just shifted in a different direction and I kind of knew that and I knew that like I wanted to change and I knew that I didn't love Northern Michigan University. I couldn't see myself finishing out there so I ended up transferring to Michigan State University. I decided to go for dietetics. Now I chose dietetics because I was super interested in nutrition. The reason why I transferred to Michigan State was for their dietetics program because Northern Michigan University didn't have a dietetics program. But as this was all going on I still had in the back of my mind that I wanted to be a PA. I just didn't think that I was dedicated and smart enough for it just because everybody always tells you it's so competitive. My Northern Michigan University advisor told me like you should probably consider doing something else like not nursing because you know I understand they're just trying to be realistic with you but that kind of steered me away from like doing that or like wanting to pursue a higher level degree in medicine. So yeah I went off to Michigan State and there I still didn't do very well. I again partied a lot. Well I didn't party a lot because I was bodybuilding so I focused a lot of my time on competing and bodybuilding and school again was just not my priority. And then after I finished bodybuilding I was going out a lot. I was drinking a lot. I was you know meeting new people and all that which was great. Again I don't regret any of my experiences but my grades were slightly better but I wouldn't say they were like amazing. They weren't like good enough to get into PA school or you know but they were they were okay. Like they were three 3.0s, 3.5s, a few 4.0s here and there. A couple 2.0s here and there. Senior year I kind of decided you know what I need to get my together. So I started adopting some of these habits and also still trying to figure out what works for me. Junior year I decided you know I really want to go to PA school. It's always been a dream of mine. I know I don't have the grades for it but I'm going to get it together this semester and if I can get 4.0s from here on out or close to getting all 4.0s from here on out I'll be able to apply to PA school and have a competitive application. Semester of junior year comes around and I felt like I had kind of adopted some pretty good habits and it began to show. It reflected in my grades. I took classes at community college over the summer for my pre-reqs for PA school just because my major didn't meet all of the requirements for PA school. So I took classes at community college. I 4.0ed all my classes at community college. I 4.0ed pretty much from here on out till I've graduated and I still am going to continue to get 4.0s in my pre-reqs for PA school. So I have about eight things written down that have helped me bring up that GPA. Let's get into the first thing that I recommend. The first thing is pretty obvious but that's to have a good support system is extremely important and I don't really need to go into much detail about this because I'm sure a lot of you know but I seriously think that was the biggest thing that helped me do well in school was having a good support system. So meeting people that are in your major that are also serious about school. Joining clubs like I was part of pre-PA club. I met people through that. Having somebody in your major that you know you see a lot in your classes that's going through the same things that you are. I would say that's a really really big thing. Another thing about having a really good support system is telling your parents, telling your friends, telling your significant other, hey you know I want to get a 4.0 this semester and you have to speak it into existence. You have to manifest it. You also need to tell people because it helps keep you accountable for your actions. Have somebody that loves you and cares about your goals and they see you starting to slip up. They see you starting to go out and maybe not devote as much time to school. They're going to say something to you. My second recommendation is utilizing online resources. This was a big change from when I was at Northern Michigan to when I went to Michigan State. So I have taken a lot of science classes and a lot of information that comes to you at once. It's kind of like drinking from a fire hydrant sometimes because you have so much information that you have to learn in such a short amount of time. I was taking anatomy my first semester of college and I would try to rewrite every single thing that my professor said in lecture and I don't recommend doing that. Like write down key points if writing things help. Writing things down helps you definitely do that but don't write down every single thing that the professor is saying because that's not sustainable and it's going to take way too much time and you're not going to learn it fast enough. I utilize online resources like Quizlet. Quizlet was probably like my lifesaver in college. Don't spend time typing out each Quizlet. Copy and paste stuff from the powerpoints. Copy and paste stuff from the information that's given to you into the Quizlet and you go through it once to just look it over. You don't try to memorize anything. You just go through it and look it over and then you go through it again. The second time you go through it when you don't remember one of the cards, star it and then come back to it. So every time you go through it you'll learn more and more until you're down to like three or four or five cards that like you know like these are going to be the hardest concepts for you to grasp. So then that's when you start writing things down and making notes or graphs or charts or whatever it is to help you remember those key things that you know you couldn't grasp while you were going through your Quizlet. Another part about utilizing online resources is using Google Calendar. I started using Google Calendar to plan everything. If I can I'll try to like upload like a screen recording of an example of my week in Google Calendar. But I was also working throughout school so I would have my work schedule be in one color, my classes would be in another color, and then I would have reminders each day or the day before something was due or I had an exam. So that way my phone would send me a reminder like hey you have this due tomorrow or you have this exam tomorrow. So that kind of helps give you like an overview of your whole entire week. You know you're always on your phone or your computer and you can just add in a reminder and be done with it. Number three, some people may agree with this some people may not agree with this, but that is to start at a community college or to take classes over the summer. Now I know a lot of people don't want to start a community college like I want to go off to college and I want to you know be on my own and like I totally get that. But if you're super serious about you know your grades at school I think it's better to start off at a community college because the classes are smaller. In my opinion I think the professors care more about if you do well or not and actually break down the material and help you learn it better. Whereas professors at big universities you know they have research they have other things going on they have hundreds of students and they can't always make sure every single person in the class knows what's going on. I know like that is may not be an option for everyone or something that you might want to do so take a class in the summer at community college or even at your university if you can just to kind of get the feel for you know what it's going to be like especially if you're a freshman or a sophomore. Notice that like when I take summer classes you know I don't take a full load I'm not taking like a whole like 16 to 18 credits or anything crazy but like just a few classes to keep your brain going. Next is self-discipline. This kind of goes back to google calendar being a schedule and sticking to it being consistent. I think this is probably the hardest part is having self-discipline you just you kind of just have to do it so unfortunately that's the way it rolls. This was a point I was going to talk about later but it kind of goes in with the self-discipline and motivation but it's to watch people that motivate you and inspire you so watching study vlogs or like watching videos on youtube of people being productive if I'm like laying in bed and I watch one of those videos I immediately want to get up and start doing something productive. Those kind of tie in together I'm not really going to say much more on that because everyone knows you need to be disciplined and it's like nobody really wants to hear that. My sixth point is utilizing office hours. This helps a lot if you develop a professional relationship with your professors they're going to see that you are dedicated and they're going to see that you have goals and they're going to want to help you. There are those professors that are just out to get you and out to give people bad grades but for the most part I would say 99.9% of the time the professors want you to do well so just having that positive relationship with them it can be helpful. Number six is to find a study routine that works for you. I am one of those people, sorry, I cannot study for more than two hours at a time. If I am sitting for more than two hours I get so antsy and I cannot do it. I also cannot study late at night. The sooner I realize those the more time I was able to spend studying knowing my productive work times and my unproductive work times. So I know like from 8 p.m to 10 p.m I am not productive whatsoever so that would be the time I would sit on TikTok every single night without fail. And also just like finding a way that you can learn material quickly. Like I said it was Quizlet for me so I would copy and paste things in the Quizlet go through it and that took me you know to get through two chapters of anatomy it would probably take me six hours to get through which seems like a lot but if you break it up into two or three days it's not that bad. But when I was trying to write everything the professor was saying I don't think I ever got through one lecture entirely. The last thing that I have is to not be too hard on yourself. I'm very type A and when I want to accomplish something I am going to accomplish it. I'm so hard on myself sometimes and I have a lot of friends that are the same way. When I decided I wanted to improve my grades I was like I'm doing it no excuses I'm not allowed to get any bad grades on anything ever again and when I did I would always beat myself up over it and I did better but I wasn't doing amazing because my stress levels were so high I like couldn't even concentrate on what I needed to be concentrating on because I was just too busy being too hard on myself. So I realized like yes you know if you want to get good grades and you want to go to law school or medical school or PA school or any sort of competitive university you have to have good grades but you don't necessarily have to have a 4.0 all of your college career all of your high school career. You can have a few grades here and there that weren't as good but you know as long as you're taking care of your mental health and taking care of your physical health you're going to do a lot better. Life is not about having 4.0 being smartest person in the room it's about finding a balance finding something that works for you and still enjoying yourself. Like I said I would not go back and change anything about my experience in college because if I would have tried to be too hard on myself and try to get amazing perfect grades from the beginning I think I would have missed out on a lot of things and I wouldn't have learned all these lessons that made me who I am today. So with that being said that's all that I have for you guys. I hope you guys enjoyed this video I hope it was informative for some. Please don't forget to like and subscribe and leave a comment share with your friends if you think they find this helpful and I will see you all in my next video. Bye.