College education can be the best investment you will make or it can be a waste of time and money. Here are ten practical things I have learned after over a decade watching honors-level students take on the challenge.
(I put comments about some points in block quotes to let you skip the commentary if you wish to do so.)
First, ignore advice to “remake” yourself the first day you get to college. You have eighteen years (or more!) being you and have to account for it. Your family history and heritage matter, even if they were not so great. Socrates was right to urge the examined life, but also be wary of making big changes quickly.
Second, do something each week that puts you in contact with people older and younger than your peer group. Spending time only with people your own age can distort perspective. If you are religious, go to service each week. Get involved beyond the main service.
Third, if you have a decent relationship with your parents keep it up. Remember that they are going through a tough transition too. Thinking only about self is never very appealing. Cut them some slack and do to them what you hope future children will do to you. Don’t be foolish enough to claim total autonomy if you are also taking money from the folks.
Fourth, if you are going to college, then go. You are in college to learn. In America, education often includes getting a job skill, but should also be about becoming a good, civilized citizen.
Attend music and sporting events. Study hard. Especially if you are going to a big ticket, private, or prestigious school/program, get everything you can out of it. Laziness is just as ugly in a college student as it is in an adult
School is your full time job, put fifty hours a week into it or go home.
Do not be obsessed with “getting out fast” at the expense of quality.
AP classes, CLEP, or IB classes are not equivalent to good college classes. If they are at your school, you should have picked a better school. Use those units to get into good (hard) classes and not to hasten the rest of your life.
If you are obsessed with getting out fast, go all the way and do alternative college from home while you work.
They are not going to let you go to college again. Enjoy it. On the other hand, five years for most students is long enough. Peter Pan the College Student is not so attractive.
Fifth, find a faculty mentor during your first year. If you cannot, then your college is charging you for an education it cannot deliver. Spend quality time with that mentor. You could hang out with dorm-types at home for free.
Sixth, take classes that are hard from full-time professors that love to teach. Try to pick your profs by researching their writing and career. Ask good students for advice.
Why pay to take an easy class from a prof who is mailing it in or who thinks teaching gets in the way of research?
Avoid “adjunct professors” unless you learn something exceptional about them by asking around the student body.
Seventh, secretaries and support staff are overworked, underpaid, and very powerful. You should be good to them out of virtue, but you must do it to thrive. The friendship you make with the department secretary now will pay dividends over the years. (One way I judge the character of a student is by how they treat the support staff.)
Eighth, books are not yet antiques. Go to the library. Talk to librarians. They are faculty members that are often under-utilized.
Spend hours a day reading. Avoid humanities classes that just assign anthologies (unless they have a very good reason for it).
Ninth, don’t be too quick to pick a major, but try to do so by the end of the first year.
Double major if you can by combining a practical (job related) major with an “impractical” one. An extra semester of college can pay off if it combines your tough philosophy major (those thinking skills!) with a computer science major (that first job!).
My father once said, “Don’t major in something with more than one word in its name or that is less than one hundred years old unless it is a hard science. If people think “easy” when they hear your major, that is a big problem.”
That’s not perfect advice, but it is worth considering.
Finally, live like an adult in college which includes moderating your passions.
Find a good community that makes you a better person.
Don’t be afraid to change suite-mates or room mates. I loved dorm life and like many college students learned a good bit from it, but it can be bad.
Dorm life is not real life since the rest of your life you will not be forced to live with random people you do not know. Find someone with similar study habits, religious views, and ideas about fun.
If college is about drinking and partying for you, save the money and get an apartment back home for your animal house.
Remember: Plato is right when he points out that nobody gives you a new soul. The Internet porn, “hooking up,” and bad behavior can scar your soul for years. Those college movies don’t show what damaged people look like twenty years after their “great” college times. Be nice to the rest of your life.
It is good to learn tolerance and diversity in college, but two in the morning with a whack room mate or over a filthy toilet is not the right place to learn it. Faculty who tell you to “learn” from your living experiences aren’t. They have their own homes.
Give a bad relationship a month and then get out.
Do consider that you might be the problem.
Don’t be put on a guilt trip by the college if you want to switch.
More good students go down the drain over bad rooming situations than any other factor I have seen. You are here to go to college, not be the dorm mother/psychologist.