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Being a straight A student can have its advantages, but it also comes at a certain price. You can find more in the first article from the series, which you can find here. More often than not, this price consists in an inordinate amount of time spent studying and, consequently, a lack of time for any real social life, a very small number of friends and, potentially even a ruined health.

The things that you miss however by devoting so much time to the goal of being a straight A student might even be more important: learning to interact with others, networking, valuable work experience.

Learning to interact with others
Although it is rarely made clear in writing anywhere, actually learning to interact with others is quite an important part of your studies, even if there are no formal exams for it. Spending time hanging out with other students and interacting with as many people as possible does not count for your A grades, but it counts for acquiring an invaluable skill that you will need in any job: communicating and working with other people.

Your time in high-school and college is often the best time to experiment ways of interaction and to learn how to get to know people, how to interact with them, how to actually communicate to them and how to react to them. It is in some sense like a sandbox for this, as even if you get it wrong several times until you learn it, the consequences are not extremely severe. After all, you are all students and you are all learning. So be aware that being a straight A student is not at all everything that you can get from your studies and it is not even necessarily the best you can get.

You might want to aim for it only if it still gives you enough time to hang out with others, actually have fun and learn at the same time the very valuable lesson of getting along with various people.

Networking
The natural next step of learning how to interact with others is networking. Networking means in fact getting to know people as various as possible and from areas as various as possible. Knowing those people gives you access to their networks of friends and acquaintances and thus can help you access information or find out things that will help you later with your career. Once again, networking requires time and it is not likely to help you gain or maintain the straight A status. Unless that status is truly worth coming out of your studies without a network of friends and acquaintances, you should think twice before focusing on it.

Valuable work experience
For finding the perfect job after graduation, it is often more important what work experience you have rather than whether you are a straight A student or not. Moreover, work experience allows you to develop a wide set of skills from working in a team to expressing yourself in writing or taking decisions. However, getting serious work experience is often rather incompatible with the straight A status, because both require a significant time investment. If you intend to find a good job after graduation, you should rather put first on your list of priorities obtaining valuable work experience. Only if you are sure that your actual goal is to study further at some of the top universities around the world, you might prefer instead to focus on being a straight A student.

Conclusions
There is much more to college and high-school life than being a straight A student. Those are some of your best years for discovery and living a full life. Don’t devote those years entirely to studying for the best grades possible, but take the time instead to discover also other people by interacting with them and having fun with them. Build your network of people and gain work experience that will help you later with your career. Being a straight A student can also be one of your goals, but don’t let it ever be the only one.