Some people are very savvy about course selection and credit/no-credit usage. These people optimize for GPA and end up having a much easier time getting into ce

Some people are very savvy about course selection and credit/no-credit usage. These people optimize for GPA and end up having a much easier time getting into certain graduate schools (law school comes to mind). Other people take classes based on what they're actually interested in, and feel bad about using credit/no-credit elections along the way. If your post-college aspirations would benefit from a high GPA, consider being savvy about this stuff. Many of the kids I knew who went to top grad programs were not smarter than other kids; they were just more mercenary about it. It's not that they didn't want to learn for the sake of learning — they just realized that their ultimate goal was HLS or whatever, and so their college goal was 'optimize the chance of getting into HLS'. Also, don't get hung up on first impressions. Some kids who rubbed me the wrong way at first ended up being decades-long friends.