Approved, Accomplished, & Absolutely Exhausted

How to win college at the cost of everything else 

Welcome, ambitious student. You have arrived. Your uniform is pressed, your org logos are strategically arranged for maximum visual impact, and your GWA (GPA) is just high enough to post about without seeming like you are bragging, though of course you are. You have mastered the first and most sacred rule of college life: always look like you are winning. The formula is simple. Finish one goal, immediately replace it with a bigger one. Dean’s list this semester, officer position next semester, internship placement after that. You are not burnt out. You are driven. There is a difference. You will figure out what that difference is sometime; after graduation, probably. But until then, here are five steps to make the most out of your college years, at whatever cost necessary. 

Step 1: 

Treat Your Grades Like Your Entire Personality 

You are a college student, which means your GWA (GPA) is not just a number. It is your identity, your reputation, and your entire self-worth packed into a class card. Study not because you genuinely want to learn, but because a low grade is a public humiliation you simply cannot survive. And if the deadline is impossible or the groupmate has vanished two days before submission, you do what every smart, resourceful student does. You find a way. Whispering answers across the room, passing along leaked exam questions from the section that took the test an hour before you, or submitting work that was more inspired by your effort than actually produced by it are not moral failures. They are survival skills. And the best part? It feels good. There is a very particular satisfaction in seeing a grade you did not entirely earn sitting at the top of your class card, a quiet private victory you will absolutely caption with something about hard work and God’s grace. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes pursued everything with that same energy and still wrote, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). A life of striving done purely for human eyes and human applause amounts, in the end, to chasing after the wind. But he probably just needed better time management. 

Step 2:  

Give God the Credit, Keep the Spotlight 

You are not just any college student. You are a Christian college student, and that comes with an important additional responsibility: making your achievements sound like they were God’s idea all along. The method is simple. Post the acceptance letter, the award, the internship offer on social media. Open the caption with gratitude, close it with a verse, and use the words humbled and blessed as often as possible. What is fundamentally a post about you will technically read as a post about God. The honest truth is that this impulse, to wrap our ambitions in spiritual language and make our striving feel sacred, comes from somewhere deeply human. We want what we do to mean something. The tragedy is not the wanting. The tragedy is dressing up self-promotion in the language of surrender for so long that we eventually stop noticing the difference. 

Step 3:  

Be Universally Liked at All Times and at All Costs 

College is a social environment, and your reputation among your peers is everything. So, when a friend makes a questionable decision, say “I support you.” When an org demands more than you have, say “Of course.” When someone asks how you are, say “Busy but good,” and you move on without pushing further. Conflict is uncomfortable, honesty is risky, and disappointing people is a fate worse than quietly losing yourself. Master the art of being agreeable, and people will love you. Just do not ask yourself too often whether any of them actually know who you really are. 

Step 4:  

Never Stop. Never Ask Why. Just Keep Going. 

The most dangerous thing a college student can do is pause. Because the moment you slow down, you start thinking. And thinking leads to the deeply uncomfortable question of whether the life you are building actually means anything to you. Ben Trueblood and Brian Mills write in A Different College Experience that the habits and decisions formed during these years do not disappear after graduation. They become the foundation of everything that comes after. Who you learn to be in these four years does not stay in college. It graduates with you. If you spend four years learning to perform rather than to actually be, you will walk across that stage having mastered the art of being whoever the room needs and having very little idea who you are when the room is empty.  

Step 5: 

When It All Catches Up, Keep Performing Anyway 

Eventually the semester ends. The org term ends. The college years end. And when the logos come off the uniform, and the titles stop being the first thing that introduces you, the question you have been too busy to face will finally find you. Not what did you achieve, but who did you become? Because here is the thing nobody tells you during enrollment: the performance has an expiration date, but the person you became while performing does not. So, when it all catches up- the exhaustion, the emptiness, the quiet suspicion that none of this is actually working- the most logical thing to do is obvious. Smile, repost your latest achievement, open a new semester with a fresh set of goals, and keep going. After all, stopping now would mean admitting that you have been running in the wrong direction the whole time. And that is a conversation nobody has time for, especially not you. 

Of course, you could choose to listen to that radical, ancient whisper that says you are already loved, chosen, and secure, freeing you from the prison of everyone else’s expectations. You could choose to live for an audience of One, the One whose opinion of you was settled long before your first enrollment, long before your first grade, long before you ever had anything to prove. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes, after all the striving and searching, arrived at the only conclusion that actually holds: “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” Ecclesiastes 12:13.  

There is a version of college that does not cost you your soul. It is quieter, less decorated, and far more free. But where is the stress in that? Where is the chaotic fun of running on 10% battery and iced coffee? No, far better to keep pleasing. After all, what profits a student if they gain the whole campus’s approval, but lose their own soul (see Matthew 16:26)?