With a full class load and a social life, students often find it hard to engage in school activities that don’t count for credit. Couple this with the general apathy of the average college student, and you have a challenge of involvment.

When students knuckle down and apply the skills they learn at this university outside of the classroom, the full college experience is attained, an experience and profile of accomplishment that matters just as much as letter grades. Whether it be the E-Club’s concrete manifestation of a student-run business or the Sustainabiliy Council’s rather sustainable rollout of the composting program, we see students applying their academic skills in a professional setting every day at CMU.

The challenge to these students is that their extra-curricular activities at the school (which are sometimes paying jobs) sometimes manage to prioritize higher than their academic responsibilities in class. At the Criterion, we struggle weekly to balance a multitude of newspaper duties with class workloads. The lesson we, as we hope all students involved in CMU student life, learn is that in the end, your extra-curricular preformance can matter as much as your grades.

Being super diligent in your studies and getting high marks is important. However, nothing can more easily allow you to demonstrate your skills like applying them in a pre-grad, professional setting like student life. You can master the skills you learn in any class, but this kind of involvement gives you the opportunity to engage an audience with them — something all students should hope to do in their post-grad, professional career.

To have a fully inclusive academic experience, students must learn that the social representation of their skills is equally important to their practical application.