Just a number

By Yameng Zhang

Today is Friday, August 31, 2012. I had 2 slices of bread at lunch, 150 calories. I learned 37 new words. I paid 430 dollar rent. I got 3 out of 5 on today's quiz. I spent 7 bucks for dinner.  Numbers are not only numbers, those are the numbers define my day.

I am a number person, because numbers matter to me. Yet, I hate that. Since kindergarten, I started to strive for those 100s, because my mom told me that the kid who scored 100 was the best. At college, GPA is what I am striving for. The higher, the better. Because before I got an interview from a company, my GPA can be the one that tells something about me.

For most cases, the achievement of how many awards you had, how many people attended the events you managed, how much money you raised, how many people you had led, how much you scored in the GRE test, how many years of experience you’ve had, those do matter since those are the numbers that will define you as a candidate. For a college admission, they may never see your face, but they will tell if you’re good enough by those numbers you had. That's the magic of numbers, and those are the magic numbers, and it is not cool to rely on those numbers.

Numbers are being overstressed that they become the ones that defines a person's value, instead of the person itself. We all know it is not easy to get all the good numbers in everything we do, the point is, don’t let them burden you, neither let them label you, no matter they are good or bad.