I know I'm supposed to write about how taking harder classes is good for your character, or something, but my concerns are a little more mundane. Grades matter under precisely two sets of circumstances: if you're applying to graduate school, or if your grades are going to stop you from graduating. Under either of those circumstances, I suggest you ignore the rest of my essay and go directly to the easier classes.

For everyone else, my reasoning for taking more difficult classes is simple: it makes all the rest of my classes easier. Learning how to do all the work, learning how to manage your time and most importantly (to my mind) learning that YOU CAN DO IT, is incredibly useful for later classes.

Also, and again I speak from experience, you learn a lot more in a hard class than in an easy one. So when choosing classes based on difficulty, the department should be a factor.

To create an example of what that, badly constructed, sentence is trying to convey: I'm a history major, therefore, I take hard history classes, because I'll need that knowledge, those tools for other classes, and maybe even for my career. I wouldn't take a very difficult Geology course, because it would eat up time which should be spent on my major, without giving me tools that I'd need for the future.

In other words, take tough classes, in a smart way.

Learn more about this author, Evan Carden.
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