Aren't We All 3?

According to Annie Murphy Paul's article "Secrets of the Most Successful College Students", there are three types of student learners: surface, strategic, and deep - respectively in that order. Surface learners do as little as they can to get by, strategic learners only care about the grade and not the material, and deep learners leave college with a deep and rich understanding of the material. After reading this beginning portion of the article, I couldn't help but to disagree that students are not classified into these three categories. Students are a little bit of each! Let me talk about myself:

A fifth year at San Diego State University, graduating in May 2019 with a BA in Social Work, Spanish, and History. When I first got admitted into San Diego State University in 2014, I was accepted into the International Business program. In the beginning, there were courses that I took which I could not fathom  at all. My first two years of college, I was just trying to get by and tried my best just to get the "A" because I could not for my life understand MIS or accounting. In this case, you could say I was a surface-level and strategic-level learner. When I had changed my major to Social Work and Spanish, I finally understood what I was learning and took that material to real-life situations. I was doing well with my grades, but there were courses I just had to take to graduate - to get by. And the reality is, is that life happens. I worked multiple jobs all throughout college; balancing out priorities was difficult every time there was a change such as a new semester or a new job or an internship. The truth is - I was not always inspired or tried to understand the entirety of the material that I was learning. It was impossible to. In between four other classes, work, relationships, activities, and other commitments; it was impossible to be the deep-learning student all four (or five) years of college. Yes, students burn out too. There are times we just have to get by and we drop from deep-learner to surface-learner. It's difficult to keep that consistency of deep-learning style.

Above all, I am proud to announce that I am graduating this May, and I consider that one of my greatest successes. Success is not determined by the type of student learner you are. I believe that every student is a little bit of every type of learner: surface, strategic, deep. And I can say from experience that deep-learners are not the only ones who are successful in the world. I believe Annie Murphy Paul's viewpoint in success is a different kind of success. However, I believe that her view of success and how it is measured is not the same success that I envision. I do believe, though, that when we take from what we have learned and apply it to real-world situations, then the education that we have received was not in vain. It was a success.