Here are ten tips to help you create a productive and memorable college experience and to enjoy this unique time in your life. They encompass all aspects of college life and cover time management, goals, allocating load, interaction with staff, memory techniques and leisure. Work through the tips and apply them to and make your college eductation stress free and easy.
1. Answer the question, “Why am I going to college?”
Many college students really do not have a clear reason for being there other than the fact that they do not know what else to do yet. They may have defaulted to the expected norm. They inherit goals from family and peers which are not truly their own. Is this you?
You must move from the position of having no direction. What are your goals now and when you leave college? Why are you there? If you do not know then you do not have a focal point for your experience. You may as well not even be there. What is it about your experience that resonates as true for you? What are you there to learn? What do you want to experience?
2. Imagine your ideal college experience.
Once you know why you are going to college, imagine your ideal outcome. Let it flow outward from the reason you are there. Whether you have already started college or not, stop right now and simply write down some attributes of your ideal experience. Describe it in as much detail as you can.
Spend time visualizing the kind of experience you want to have. See yourself being challenged but managing it easily and without stress. See yourself making new friends. See yourself having a really great time. Imagine a very balanced experience — a blend of academics, activities, socialization, and fun. The keyword to use is “richness.”
This is a really important step. You may not understand the mechanism at this time, but you are pre-programming yourself to succeed. You will become a co-creator of your experience instead of a passive victim of it.
Visualization allows you to make mistakes in advance. If you cannot get a clear visualization, your experience is likely to be just as fuzzy. Debug your visualization until it inspires you.
Real life will of course turn out differently than you visualize. The point of visualization is not to predict the future or to restrict your freedom to decide later. The point is to give you more clarity for making decisions right now. Your ideal scene serves as a map that can guide you through the quagmire of options.
3. Take at least one extra class each semester.
Students are taught that twelve to fifteen semester units (three to five classes) is a “full” schedule. But a schedule that light is hardly full. A person with a full time job will put in a good forty plus hours per week, and students enjoy every possible vacation day plus spring break, winter break, and summer vacation. If you want to spend four or more years in college, add more degrees or get a job on the side. Do not feel you have to go at a snail’s pace just because everyone else does.
Now you might be thinking that twelve to fifteen units are supposed to equate to a forty hour week with all the outside homework and studying, but that is only going to happen if you do things very inefficiently (which sadly is what most people do). If you follow some of the time saving tips later in this article, then fifteen units should only require a few additional hours outside of class to complete assignments. You will succeed by overworking yourself.
If you are an above average student, you can certainly handle an above average schedule. Sometimes we do not know what we can handle until we push ourselves a little. If you think you can handle fifteen units, take eighteen to twenty. You can easily shave a year off your schedule. Or you may be able to add a minor or a double major.
What about prerequisites? For the most part you may simply ignore them, and fortunately at many schools they are not enforced too well. Most of the time a prerequisite is listed; it is geared towards below average students. Do not let pointless bureaucracy slow you down if you want to graduate sooner. There is always a way around it — it is usually just a matter of getting some random form signed by someone who is too bored to care either way. A smile and a compliment go a long way.
By the law of forced efficiency, if you put more things on your plate, you will find a way to get them done with the time you have available. So if you do not challenge yourself a little, that extra time will slip through your fingers.
The real benefit to a dense schedule is not that you will graduate sooner. The real benefit is that you will enjoy a richer experience. If you take five classes instead of four means it more learning, more achievement, and more friends. And what employer would not be attracted to a student who graduated more quickly than their peers? This sort of thing sure looks great on a resume.
4. Set clear goals for each class.
Decide what you want out of each specific class. Is this a subject you are eager to learn? Do you want to target this teacher for a letter of recommendation? Is this a required class you must take but which does not otherwise interest you?
Your goals for each class will determine how often you show up, whether you will sit in the front or the back, how actively you will participate, and what kind of relationship you will seek to establish with the teacher.
For some classes you may want to master the material. For others you may just want an A grade. And for others you may want to set yourself up for glowing letters of recommendations from enthusiastic teachers.
This is not about manipulating your professors into lying on your behalf. The simple truth is that the quality of a letter of recommendation ultimately comes down to how much a teacher respects you. A lack of respect will always show as insincere words. Do not put yourself in the desperate situation of having to request a letter of recommendation from a teacher who does not even remember you — or worse, one who thinks poorly of you. Set yourself up for success in advance.
Sometimes you will have teachers who are pointless. You may decide to avoid their classes often and learn the material from a textbook. Obviously you will not seek out their assistance later on.
Sometimes you will achieve your goals; sometimes you will not. Even if you do your best, you may still fall short. You may encounter teachers that are unfair, lazy, sexist, racist, or otherwise incompetent. You will have to pick your battles; some are worth fighting and others are best ignored. Having clear goals will help you decide which is which.
5. Triage ruthlessly.
You do not need to put an equal amount of effort into every class. Inject extra effort when it is important to you, but feel free to back off a little from classes that are a low priority based on your specific goals. This is an important way to conserve energy. You cannot play full in every class, or you would eventually burn out, so invest your energy where it matters most.
In every student’s schedule, some classes are critical while others are almost trivial. In a typical week, you can usually ditch around some classes because you do not need to be there. For some classes attendance is necessary, but for others it does not make much difference. You can simply get the notes from another student if needed, or can learn the material from the textbook. If it is not necessary for you to attend a particular class (based on your goals for that class), you may consider ditching it. That can save you a lot of time and keep you from having to sit in class all day long.
You should also triage individual assignments. If you feel an assignment is lame, pointless, or unnecessarily tedious, and if it would not have too negative an impact on your grade, you may actually decline to do it.
Sometimes teachers get a little too homework happy and hand out assignments that really do not justify the effort – it is your life not theirs. You are in charge of your academic experience though, not your teachers. Do not feel you must do every assignment just because the teacher feels it is a good idea, they are not perfect. You must be the judge in accordance with your own reasons for being there. Just be sure to consider the consequences of your decision.
By stealing time from low priority assignments, you are able to invest more time in the real gems. Some creative assignments will teach you a great deal. Some people hate group projects, but there may be particular group projects where the team really gels and you enjoy it tremendously and learn a lot from it.
A cool triage technique is timeboxing. Decide how much time the assignment warrants, and then do the best job you can within the allotted time. So if you have to write a ten page research page on American history, you might devote eight hours to it in total. Slice up the eight hours into topic selection, planning, library research, outlining, writing, and editing, and then do your best to stay within those times. This is a great way to keep you from overdoing an assignment that does not need it.
In a way this is your own academic load balancing. Some of your assignments will be unbalanced in the sense that they seem to require an unreasonable amount of effort compared to how much of your grade they represent or how much you expect to benefit from completing them. Sometimes you may decide that the effort to write an A-paper just is not warranted. Maybe you estimate it would take you twenty hours to do an A job but only ten hours to do a B job. And if the assignment was only ten per cent of your grade, perhaps you could accept a B there. Often to your surprise you will find that your B quality papers will come back with A’s anyway.
6. Get an early start to each day.
Practice becoming an early riser. This does not mean 5am, but usually around 6-7am. An early start each day will help you to get a lot more done, not just in the morning but throughout the day. Began each day with a short run, follow this with a shower and breakfast. Do not skip breakfast as you need the reserves to avoid a lull in your energy later in the morning, if not the whole day. This simple morning routine will get you out the door feeling alert and energized.
No one gets up early because they want to. It is really out of necessity. Even if you hate morning classes, you may find that you are a lot more productive if you schedule them anyway.
7. Reclaim wasted time during your classes.
Not every class is going to require your utmost concentration. Sometimes teachers babble. Sometimes they reiterate what you already know. Establish what percentage of class time require your complete, focused attention? For some classes it is less than one hundred per cent. For others it is much closer to twenty per cent. If you are not actively learning during class, you are wasting time. If a class is really challenging, sit in the front and soak up every word and write it down. But if a class is not challenging you, then sit in the back, do homework for other classes, and pop your head up every once in a while to see if there is anything worth jotting down. Always have a book open, so when your professor goes off on yet another nostalgia trip, you will have something productive to do.
This is a surprisingly great cure for boredom. If the professor is droning on and putting everyone to sleep, you can be working on other assignments.
You will be amazed at how much time you can free up using this method. You will be able to complete the bulk of your assignments in class, but usually not in the classes in which the tasks were assigned. If you are in school right now, see how much extra homework you can complete during your normal class time today. Then estimate how many hours you will save every week from this practice. It really adds up.
You cannot concentrate at peak efficiency continuously, so be sure to take breaks. When you need a break though, take a real break. Meditate or nap on the grass between classes in order to recharge your batteries. Use your wristwatch or phone alarm to signal when it is time to get up and go again. These breaks are very restorative, and you can go to the next class and work full out once again. Never work flat out all day long. Work in waves between total concentration and total relaxation, cycling many times per day.
8. Learn material the very first time it is presented.
One of the biggest time wasters in school is your having to relearn something you did not learn properly the first time. When students say they are studying, most of the time they are making up for a previous failure to learn the material.
In software development it is well known that bugs should be fixed as soon as possible after they are introduced. Waiting to fix a bug near the end of a project can take fifty times as much effort as it would take to fix the bug the first time it was noticed. Failing to learn what you are supposedly taught each day is a serious bug. Do not try to pile new material on top of an unstable foundation, since it will take even more time to rebuild it later.
If you do not understand something you were taught in class today, treat it as a bug that must be fixed as soon as possible – no exceptions. Do not put it off. Do not pile new material on top of it. If you do not understand a word, a concept, or a lesson, then drop everything and do whatever it takes to learn it before you continue on. Ask questions in class, get a fellow student to explain it to you, read and re-read the textbook, and/or visit the professor during office hours, but learn it no matter what.
There may be a couple topics you fid incomprehensible when they are first introduced. Many of your classmates may find them confusing too, so do not always assume you are alone, check with them and bring the subject up with the teacher. Students who allow their confusion to linger find themselves becoming more and more lost as the course progresses, and cramming at the end can never bestow complete comprehension. Just like programming bugs, confusion multiplies if left untreated, so stamp it out as early as possible. If you are confused about anything you are being taught, you have got a bug that needs fixing. Do not move on until you can honestly say to yourself, “Yes, I understand that… what’s next?”
Ideally there should be no need to study outside of class, at least in the sense of relearning material you did not learn the first time. You can review old material to refresh your memory, but you should not have to devote a minute of your time to learning something that was taught a month or two earlier.
If you follow this regime then during finals you will probably be the least-stressed student of all. You should not have to study hard now because by the time the final exam comes up, in your mind the course is already over. While everyone else is cramming, you can be spending leisure time. At most you will just spend some time reviewing your notes to refresh the material the night before the test. Isn’t this how academic learning is supposed to work? Otherwise what is the point of showing up to class for an entire semester?
During each semester ask yourself this question: Are you ready to be tested right now on everything that has been taught up to this point? If your answer is ever “no,” then you know you are falling behind, and you need to catch up immediately. Ideally you should be able to answer “yes” to this question at least once a week for every subject.
Falling behind even a little is an enormous source of stress and a time waster. First, you have to go back and re-learn the old material when the rest of the class has already moved on. Secondly, you may not learn the new material as well if it builds on the old material because you lack a solid foundation, so you just end up falling further and further behind. Then when you come to the end of the semester, you end up having to re-learn everything you were supposed to learn. But because you cram at the last minute, after finals you forget everything anyway.
Put in the effort to learn your material well enough to get A’s in all your classes. It will pay off. Much of the material you learn will build on earlier material. If you get A’s in your freshman courses, you will be well prepared to pile on new material in your sophomore year. But if you get C’s that first year, you are already going into your second year with an unstable foundation, making it that much harder to bring your grades up and really master the material. Make straight A’s your goal every semester. In the long run, it is much easier. C students tend to work a lot harder, especially in their junior and senior years, because they are always playing catch up. Despite your packed schedule, it should not be stressful for you because you have kept on top of every subject. Consequently, you will have plenty of time for fun while other students experience lots of stress because they constantly feel unprepared.
9. Master advanced memory techniques.
One of the keys to learning material the first time it is taught is to train yourself in advanced memory techniques. You can use them often in classes that require rote memorization of certain facts, including names, dates, and mathematical formulas. If a teacher writes something on the board that has to be memorized verbatim for an upcoming exam, you must memorize it then and there. Then you will not have to go back and study it later.
You may have encountered simple mnemonic techniques such as using the phrase “Every good boy does fine” to memorize the musical notes E, G, B, D, and F. Those kinds of tricks work well in certain situations, but they are so grammar school. There are far more efficient visual techniques. Two good methods are chaining and pegging.
It is beyond the scope of this article to explain these techniques in detail, but you can find plenty of books on memory improvement.
These techniques will allow you to memorize information very rapidly. For example, with pegging you can usually memorize a list of about twenty items in about ninety seconds with perfect recall even weeks later. Experts at this are much faster. Anyone can do it — it is just a matter of training yourself.
Chaining allows you to memorize your speeches visually. When you give a speech, your imagination runs through the visual movie you have created while you select words on the fly to fit the images. It is like narrating a movie. Your speech is not memorized word for word, so it sounds natural and spontaneous and can be adapted on the fly to fit the situation. Memorizing visually is much faster and more robust than trying to memorize words. If you memorize a speech word for word and forget a line, it can really throw you off and you will struggle to catch where you were. But with a series of images, it is easier to jump ahead to the next frame if you make a mistake. Our brains are better suited to visualize memorization than phonetic memorization.
It is not recommend you memorize by repetition because it is way too slow. Pegging and chaining do not require repetition — they allow you to embed strong memories on a single pass, usually in seconds. The downside is that pegging and chaining require a lot of up-front practice to master, but once you learn them, these are valuable skills you will have for life. These techniques seem to improve your memory as a whole, even when you are not actively trying to memorize. This practice trains your subconscious to store and recall information more effectively.
It is a shame these techniques are not normally taught in school. They would save students an enormous amount of time. Do yourself a favor and learn them while you are young. They have a lot of practical applications, including remembering people’s names. This will aid you greatly in later life as there is nothing so important to a person that their name and forgetting it will do you a great disservice.
10. Have some serious fun!
Challenge yourself academically, but give yourself plenty of time for fun as well. Do not squander your leisure time hanging around doing nothing. Go out and do something active that will let off steam and increase your energy.
One of the biggest regrets of some students is devoting all their time to studying and not having a partner during that time. You may opt to add an extra semester and take fewer classes to make time for that someone special. After all they may become that confidant who you lean on to get you through the whole learning process.
This article’s advice centers on making your college experience as rich and memorable as possible. Get your school work done quickly and efficiently, so you have plenty of time for the variety of activities a college can offer. Join clubs. Play games. Get a partner. The worst thing you can do is spend your time falling behind academically due to poor habits, feeling stressed and unprepared all the time, and then playing catch up. Squeeze as much juice out of college as you can, and let it serve as a springboard to a lifetime of fulfilment.
People often assume your aggressive schedule must have been stressful and exhausting, but the irony is that it may have been just the opposite. Students with lighter schedules may slack off and fall behind because they convinced themselves they could make up for it later. But you cannot afford to do that because it will be impossible for you to catch up on a dozen different classes, and way too stressful to even think about it. If you fall even a week behind, you will be in serious trouble. So develop good habits that kept you perpetually relaxed, focused, and energized. Many of the habits discussed above are simply the result of setting the goal to graduate in three semesters. That goal will dictate the process.
The experience will show you just how much more effective you can be when you push yourself beyond your comfort zones. It will teach you to keep setting goals beyond what you feel certain you can accomplish. Many times what we assume to be impossible just is not. We only think it is.
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