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Looking for advice on college life.
littwentythree
Registered User
Registered User
I'm currently a high school senior, and I will be entering into a California State School next fall. Not exactly a University, but I made due with my early mistakes. My intended major will be Psychology, if that makes any difference to anyone.
What I want to know is this: What would you have liked for someone to have told you before you went off to college? Any advice on majors, living arrangements, or just general college life would be useful to me. Thanks in advance.
What I want to know is this: What would you have liked for someone to have told you before you went off to college? Any advice on majors, living arrangements, or just general college life would be useful to me. Thanks in advance.
littwentythree on
Posts
Make lots and lots of friends. Don't be like most people and get stuck in one group of friends. Always, always look to expand your social circle. What you can accomplish after college, the doors that open for you and the opportunities that are presented to you, have a lot to do with the connections you make while attending college. Sometimes it just takes knowing one person who will give you that little boost you need, so you can lend that job you want. Or knowing one person who knows the best doctors to take care of you and your loved ones. Or one person to pull the strings so you can get away with something you normally would get into a shitload of trouble for. One person to know the best lawyers to defend you when you're wronged, one person to drop a line to the car dealer who will give you one heck of a deal. One person to introduce you to the girl whom you will marry.
We are social creatures and we take strength from each other, so the more people you know, the stronger you are, and the stronger they are.
No seriously.
Go to Fucking class.
Log off WoW, put down the 12 pack of Natural light, and get to class.
Barring any of that, the only thing I wished someone had told me was - avoid ever touching a credit card for 4 years.
Don't waste time. By that I mean don't be dropping your classes mid-semester. It's not something i'm overly guilty of, but I have a lot of friends who are constantly kicking themselves in the arse because they always dropped. Same goes for changing majors. Be careful of when you do it, and think about how many classes will now be useless (towards your graduation).
Do as well as you possibly can in your general requirements to get your GPA up. I did fairly well in this regard, but not as well as I should've. It's a lot easier to get an A in Composition I than it is to get one in Solid State Physics.
NO MMORPGs!
I fell victim to this, as well as many people I know. Consoles I feel are okay, as it's a lot easier to control the time you spend on them. MMORPGs are so difficult. It's much harder to pull away because your friends are playing. It's not easy to just say mid-dungeon run that you have to leave to get some studying/homework done because you know you'll be letting them down. Just stay away from it, it's so much easier.
Have a good place to study. Don't study at the same desk as your PC, or if you don't have the will power, don't study in the same room as your PC. Go to the Uni library and find a quiet area to study a couple of hours a day. Do this and you'll ace all your classes. It's difficult to study with the distraction of the PC (especially if you come to PA, ha ha). You'll take small breaks and end up on the forum more than in the books. Then, at the end of the night, you feel like you've studied 4 hours when in reality it was more around 45 minutes thrown around sporadically.
Edit: I knew I forgot something. Fucking yes, make good relationships with your professors. They're people too. I have one in particular who i've become great friends with. We go golfing together, and he was an olympic qualifying fencer and if I have the time next semester, I'm hoping to learn with him. We used to play DnD together, but his wife wasn't fond of the of the noise level/laughing the 6-7 of us made so that stopped. Not only is it good for networking/recommendations etc, but you'll find they are a lot more genuine than a lot of the folks you've ever met throughout your life.
Once you get past a certain point, marks don't matter beyond pass/fail. What I mean is, after you graduate it's highly unlikely a prospective employer will give two shits what your GPA was. Either you have a degree or you don't. Now obviously you may need to keep your grades up for reasons other than getting a job, such as if you're applying for scholarships, bursaries, or other awards based on marks, or if you're planning to go on to graduate school later on, or transfer to a different school that will make an acceptance decision based on marks, or if your program has a minimum average you need to maintain to stay in the program. Just be aware that graduating with a 4.0 GPA is probably a gigantic waste of your time, by and large. You'd probably have a much more well-rounded experience by cutting back on study time to allow for more socializing. Of course, it's more likely though that you'll have the opposite problem: low marks and too much partying. :lol: In either event, you need to find a balance. Too much of either will be detrimental for you in the long run.
Oh man, bolded for truth. I was previously a computer science major and I started hating every second of it. The material wasn't difficult, but perhaps I had been doing it for fun too long, and when it came down to actually being forced to do it I was just sick of it. Look around and talk to people, perhaps do some soul searching for a semester or two so you can quickly decide what to do. I'm now a physics major and am about to graduate this upcoming summer, and I've been loving every bit of it. Sure it's a lot of work, but it's been extremely rewarding and my grades have improved drastically!
You will regret doing so
I am too lazy to lime this all, but I agree with everything. If you plan on going to college and pay 30-60k playing MMORPG's, pay me the money instead and I will play with you whenever you want.
You are there to have fun, go to school and get a degree. I have seen all too many people fail out because they stayed up for 12 hours raiding Molten Core and zerg rushed Orgrimmar.
If faith is just a silent tribute, mine is just a desperate act.
The more they personally know you, the easier it will be to talk to them in class, or if you need help outside of class. Plus, if they are in your department, you will likely be seeing them again at some point.
On a related note, if you start slipping in a class, don't just think you can catch up on it later, and don't give up. This is one area where talking to the professor during office hours can come in really handy. A simple meeting with the professor can be the difference between failing a test and getting a C on a test - not only because you'll improve, but also because the professor knows that you're trying.
And above all, as has been said, go to class. Every day. Ask questions if you have them. Ask questions if you aren't 100% certain of an answer. The basic idea here is that the more involved you get with your education, the better it will be (naturally). Not only because you will learn more, but because you will show that you care about your education (far too few students do these days).
Meet Barack Obama
If faith is just a silent tribute, mine is just a desperate act.
I strongly recommend taking pass/fail classes when you can, but if you do, realize that sometimes you need a C average to qualify as passing, not just a D.
Buy books used when at all possible. But if buying used, look through the book before you buy it. People will often highlight passages, and I know some people don't like finding their books all marked up. Personally I liked it when I bought a book with highlights, since I knew I wasn't going to be doing it myself.
Join a club or organization of some kind. More than one if possible.
Consider joining a fraternity. I didn't, but if you find a group that you like and they want you to join, you can certainly make some great life-long contacts. Don't do it just because you want to drink, though. You can drink in college without going greek.
If you haven't traveled much I strongly recommend you consider going abroad for a semester or a year. I have traveled a lot and I still wish I had done that.
Enjoy yourself! It's all downhill once you join the real world.
I've got 8 am classes each day and I don't mind now... I've gotten used to it. Best thing to do schedule wise is take Fridays off. I've got no classes then and it is awesome.
Basically same as everybody else said, when you need to study, just do it. If you avoid it it will kick your butt later on.
-The first week or so are crucial for meeting people. Once you meet a few don't stop, cause once that window closes it gets all the more difficult.
-Shower sandals
-become a habitual locker. even if you're just going down the hall, or to the bathroom
-GET SLEEP. Sleeping a decent amount of hours helps reduce the chance of you sleeping through your alarm. Missing that one morning class once might not matter, but once a week? I'm narcoleptic so I have a little trouble getting up in the morning, so when I combined this with late nights, I missed my fair share of classes. Not a good idea.
-Determine if your university has decent food. If not, bring stock accordingly. My university's food is less than desirable. You don't eat much of it because it's awful, and it doesn't stay in you long. You don't want the reverse freshman 15 (unless you need it).
-JUMP on any extra credit opportunities. Those exams rape.
-Just because it's a pass/fail required class, doesn't mean you can slack. You still have to pass it. Silly I know, but a lot of people forget that.
I missed a couple of extra credit assingments because I didnt write them down and forgot about them, and those exams do RAPE.
don't skip class. go to any tutoring there is available. and make friends in class, that you can exchange numbers and ask about assignments and (dont count on this) notes.
oh and don't ask for class notes via mass email if you missed class. that's the most annoying thing in the world to receive in your inbox.
edit: and don't oversleep. my roomate does that all the time, and out of the four classes he has, he's failing two.
avoid all nighters like the plague, if you can't deal with them.
edit 3: my roomate is a douche, and I hate him.
A great piece of advice is to try and not party the first year that much. Focus on your grades, and work your freakin' ass off as a freshman. That way you don't have to work your ass off for 3 other years trying to bring up your GPA.
So work your ass off the first year, and you'll be able to ride that GPA through college if you do what's required.
Check out my art! Buy some prints!
and don't go in debt.
take if from the master.
Emphasizing this.
I put a lot of time and effort into my classes freshman year. I'm at the point in my college career where I can actually tell what kind of paper I'm writing (A/B/C/D/F) and what I would need to fix to improve it. I can also pump out a very coherent and well thought out ten pager in 2-3 hours, where as before, it took about an evening (6 hours) to write it all out freshman year.
So yeah, build good habits your first year and you won't regret it.
Make good relationships with your professors. It's been said, but you have no idea how valuable that is. They can write you good recommendations, sure, but in the offchance you oversleep through a test or something, having a good relationship is the difference between "No problem" and "See you next semester."
Do live in a dorm with the door open, the freshman friends you make are most likely the friends you'll keep all four (or five, or six) years.
I'll add more later.
I found the complete opposite to be good for me. Having an 8 AM class Tues/Thurs helped a lot to maintain a good sleeping schedule (which is very important, especially in college with lots and lots of opportunities for fun around).
edit:
Good god, yes. Some of my closest friends have been made because of this. Also, don't be scared to pop into an open room or two and socialize, the doors are open for that reason.
People have said this already, but never stop meeting people. I lived in a medium-sized student village just off campus, and most of my friends lived there. That was cool, the first year, but the second year we lived in a part of the city with few students and I met, literally, no-one. Coupled with the fact that most of my old friends moved to a much more studenty place, I lost contact with a load of them, too. And because I've never made any friends off my course (you'll have plenty of day-crippling hangovers in your first year), I've always felt awkward speaking to those guys. This year I do a lot for the student magazine and I've met some awesome people, and I live in that studenty place which helps me keep close to everyone, and it's brilliant. The window of opportunity never shuts, it just becomes harder to squeeze through.
The "no class before 10am" is good advice, but even then you'll be getting up at god-knows what hour. 11am is my preferred earliest, unfortunately I have one 10am that marks the lowlight of my week. It's probably a bad habit to be getting into, though.
And to the guy that said ask out nice girls you meet, well I agree in theory, I'm just generally too much of a pussy to do so. Don't be that guy.
Learn to use stundent computer centers if your college has them; I found it was much easier to grind through papers in that environment than in my dorm room where my PC games, tv, and consoles were all inviting distractions. Plus if you use the public printers you don't have to keep a printer in your room, though I presume some colleges charge for this.
Pack as lightly as possible. It wasn't untile years 3 and 4 that I became good at this, but when you bring stuff you think you might need and then don't touch it until you pack up at the end of the year, it's a sure sign you never should have packed it in the first place.
Something that worked pretty well for me when writing papers (I was a Government and History double major) was to select topics that were off the beaten path. I think there were a number of times that I got better grades than I deserved simply because I wasn't turning the same basic paper the prof had read over and over again since they began teaching. It can mean a little more work for you, but I think it's more fun and like I said the results were definitely in my favor.
Don't be the guy on your hall who hassles people about the state of the lounge area, leaving lights on, etc. That gets real old real fast.
Haha, more like goatse.
[spoiler:69f1175fff]The screensaver was tubgirl.[/spoiler:69f1175fff]
that gets old faster
Damnit, now I want bacon.
Valid points. I think the real idea here is 'don't be a dick at either end of the spectrum.'
One I just thought of is: don't try to use your parents to enforce unreasonable rules on your roommate. My freshman year there was a guy on my hall - very religious dude, who was morally opposed to his roommate having girls over. When his roommate was less than thrilled by this he called his parents and then used the line (now infamous among those of us on the hall) 'My parents say you can't.' You are better off being the messy guy who doesn't shower than being this guy.
So spread yourself out there, join groups, talk to lots of random people at the start, everyone's keen to make friends then.
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Well yeah, but it's a percentage. Therefore, the more net people you meet, the more chance you'll have of meeting non-dickhead people.
When this doesn't work, accidentally steal your girlfriends work but make some nicer diagrams in Illustrator, thus gaining you a better mark.
[spoiler:b8a7351483]This is what I did. Do the precise opposite of it and everything will be just fine[/spoiler:b8a7351483]
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