OT: Advice for college students

Here are a couple things that I learned the hard way

First, If you are leaving for college with a current significant other, unless you are One Hundred Percent sure that you will marry that person, be open to meeting and going out with other people. 99.99% of the time that significant other will drive you bat *poop* crazy by mid term.
Next, if it is a smaller college with smaller classes, get to know your professors. This is a major advantage. You may have to kiss a little back side but it is worth it when you have to make up a bull*poop* excuse. They will swallow it down with a smile.
Another one, find out how you absorb information the best. Everyone will tell you that taking notes is absolutly neccessary. Me, never took one note. I don't learn that way. I pay too much attention to getting everything down, and no attention to what is being taught. It worked very well for me. Just find out what is the best way for you, then go from there.
Get to know at least half of your class mates. This is a no brainer. It will help you immensly. If you miss class due to being sick or hung over, they will grab handouts or assignments for you. And you can do the same for them. Also, you will make more friends that last from college.
And finally, no your alcohol limit. LEARN HOW TO DRINK-this only applies to those of us that live where alcohol is the debil and can not be touched untill you can die for your country. There is nothing worse than a binge drinker. Start slow and work your way up. There is no shame with being the light weight. You just pay less for your booze.

I do have more advice-I just graduated last year- So if ya want more let me know...

one last piece-listen to all advice-follow half.:thumbsup:
EJB
 
A few rules from my experiences:

A) Have fun. University is a fun time in life - most people on campus don't know who you are and don't care about what you do/dress like/act like (as long as you aren't being an obnoxious jerk). It isn't like high school in that regard (except for some folks, and, well, you probably won't be seeing much of them). Explore your interests, join clubs, meet people.

B) Study what you are interested in/passionate about. Most people I knew who persued something because of family pressure or because they figured the job market was good for that wound up leaving their studies before they finished. If you like the subject, you'll put up with the petty crap you have go through in your classes with more good will.

C) Give your studies the attention they deserve. You don't have to go nuts - as others have pointed out, a 4.0 or a 3.9 or a 3.3 GPA don't matter much outside of the University life - no one has ever asked me what my GPA was during a job interview. But, you are there to learn, and make sure you do that. I watched too many friends leave university because of too much partying/not enough studying.


D) Give yourself at least one night a week off. This becomes especially important during mid-terms/finals, when the last-minute cramming is going on. You need a mental health break to maintain some level of functioning. Take it, even if all you do is zone out in front of D2 for a while :grin:

E) At my University, the Student's Union had created an "exam bank" - copies of previous year's exams - for many different introductory level courses. These were valuable study aids - the sections for these courses were large (200+) and there were usually many different sections offered in the same semester, but they all used the same exam. Because of the need for consistency, questions were often repeated/had similarities from one year to the next. Find out if your campus has something similar.
 
EJB said:
You may have to kiss a little back side but it is worth it when you have to make up a bull*poop* excuse. They will swallow it down with a smile.
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I agree, one should always develop a taste for arse.

It is often through the back door (side?) that we can get to high places.

If you start off at the rim, you'll slowly ease yourself into the pan.

Give it a crack.
 
A little Psych tip... when studying or listening to lectures in class, hold a pen or pencil. The act of holding a writing implement stimulates your brain, helping you take in information. This is especially good for that terrible terrible textbook reading. There is a study somewhere that supports this, I'll have to dig it up...
 
Okay, my turn. Listen to all clever advices but don't necessarily take any of them (no, not mine either). Your life, your choices.

If you're coming directly from high school, don't start at a university right of, unless you're really sure you want it. Work, travel, sit in your underwear and play d2 or do whatever for a year or so first.

Don't drink too much coffee.





I have a question too. What's the difference between a collage and a university in USA?
 
Kefir-Tribe said:
I have a question too. What's the difference between a collage and a university in USA?
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From what I know,
Universitys are normally state funded, there fore easier to get into.
Colleges are normally private institutions with a higher standard of addmission.
Then there are Community Colleges that are more for people that either A)Don't know what they want to do and just take some General Education courses-math, english, sciences- or B) are trade/vocation schools-i.e. Mechanics, Truck drivers, the like. or C) and there are more and more of these every damned day...Comm. Coll. that offer LPN-liscensed practitioner Nursing, Medical Assistant, and other health care related proffesion degrees.

But then there are some places of higher learning that don't go by this naming higherarchy.

EJB

For my own info, what are the distinctions through out the rest of the world?
 
Thanks for the info.

Here in Sweden, I think there're generally three types of institutions for higher studies.

There're "universitet", "högskolor" and "folkhögskolor". I guess you can figure out what the first one is. Translated directly to English "högskola", to confusion, means "high school" (our "gymnasium" is pretty much the same as your senior high school, I think).

The difference (at least it's supposed to be the difference) between a university and a högskola is that universities hosts researchers, while högskolor only focus on education. Therefore universities often have a bit higher status (there're exceptions of course).

"folkhögskola" means "people high school" translated roughly. They were the chance of an education for normal people back in the days when universities just were for rich people. They're usually small places and I honestly don't know much else about them.

I’ve got the impression the collage students often lives in certain designated places (you talk about room mates etc.). That’s mostly not the case here. There’s no coincidence that there’re a lot of small and cheap flats, corridor rooms close to most universities though.
 
Going to college for us normally means that we (as students) go out on our own for the first time. It is generally a big thing. For me, I went from a very small town in a rural setting-60 people live in the town that I am from, the town I went to High School in only has 1200- and then I moved to a medium sized city of roughly 100,000. I also moved 6 hours from home. And for living arrangements, normally for the first semester or two you have a roommate in a cramped single living space. My dorm room was basically 12 feet by 20 feet with two single beds that could be made into bunk beds, two desks, and two dressers. You have to learn to get along and share space.
So it is more of a right of passage for most 18 year olds here, at least in the mid west. I won't even begin to talk for the rest of my country let alone anywhere else.

EJB
 
Hm.. maybe I should back up some of the stuff being a teacher and all.. but I remember Toppo's post.. uh I mean.. I remember the way I used to study :grin:
 
Kefir-Tribe said:
I have a question too. What's the difference between a collage and a university in USA?
Click to expand...

It's actually different in different states.

A college has fewer majors and gets less government funding than a university. NY for example has much higher standard (I use that term loosly, it really has to do with the quantity not quality) than California when it comes to labeling a school a university.

Anyways... Have fun in college! I know I am.
The idea is to study just enough to get the grades that you want, nothing more nothing less.

P.S. Don't go to exams drunk/high. Not a good idea. :hide:
 
Here's my take on this as a college prof:

1) Learn how to learn. The problem here is that everyone learns differently. One thing I never could do is to take notes in class. I found I didn't learn anything. Writing stuff down gave me an excuse not to learn it. I found that taking sparse notes, and actually paying attention in class was much better for me. Still, there are those who learn better by writing everything down, and then later re-writing it. Don't take anyone's advice on this matter as absolute... you have to learn for yourself how to learn.

2) A "Lecture" is not trying to teach you the material in the same way a "Class" was doing in highschool. You're not going to get the same feedback and repetition in a lecture. It's not that your prof is a bad teacher, it's just that the assumption is that you're going to do the learning on your own. A lecture has two purposes: To show you what you need to learn, and to prove that someone out there already knows it.

3) Use tutors and your professor's office hours for feedback. Your classes are going to cover less material than is available, and you can really get more out of a subject by discussing it with someone. Forming study groups also works, so long as the group is actually a study group and not a loser's support group. If your group is supporting bad performance, leave it. Many groups do this... you can tell right off by people blaming the prof for their poor grades, or ridiculing the text.

4) Your health is more important than your classes. You can catch up on your work after you are healthy, but trying to learn stuff while sick is pointless. Get healthy first, then learn. On that subject... take it easy on the booze/drugs. Give yourself weeks where you stop using them. Don't get into a daily or every other day habit.

5) Learn the benifits/restrictions of caffine. This is a great drug, but again... learn to use it.

6) Work 60-80 hours a week. Work includes classes and study, homework and a job if you have one. If you put in that kind of time now for four years, a 40 hour/week job that you get paid for will seem like a vacation when you graduate. Don't sit on your butt playing diablo II until you have your 60 hours in, or are well on your way to it. Sacrilege I know... but try it.

7) Don't buy Hellgate: London until summer, and don't tank it to school with you when you go back.
 
Cauthon said:
A few rules from my experiences:

A) Have fun. University is a fun time in life - most people on campus don't know who you are and don't care about what you do/dress like/act like (as long as you aren't being an obnoxious jerk). It isn't like high school in that regard (except for some folks, and, well, you probably won't be seeing much of them). Explore your interests, join clubs, meet people.

B) Study what you are interested in/passionate about. Most people I knew who persued something because of family pressure or because they figured the job market was good for that wound up leaving their studies before they finished. If you like the subject, you'll put up with the petty crap you have go through in your classes with more good will.

C) Give your studies the attention they deserve. You don't have to go nuts - as others have pointed out, a 4.0 or a 3.9 or a 3.3 GPA don't matter much outside of the University life - no one has ever asked me what my GPA was during a job interview. But, you are there to learn, and make sure you do that. I watched too many friends leave university because of too much partying/not enough studying.


D) Give yourself at least one night a week off. This becomes especially important during mid-terms/finals, when the last-minute cramming is going on. You need a mental health break to maintain some level of functioning. Take it, even if all you do is zone out in front of D2 for a while :grin:

E) At my University, the Student's Union had created an "exam bank" - copies of previous year's exams - for many different introductory level courses. These were valuable study aids - the sections for these courses were large (200+) and there were usually many different sections offered in the same semester, but they all used the same exam. Because of the need for consistency, questions were often repeated/had similarities from one year to the next. Find out if your campus has something similar.
Click to expand...

Wow, this is all very good advice. I knew that! I wish I had written it. ;)

About E), though...At my university, only the lazy, rich kid, frat boys had access to something like this, and it was considered cheating. They used to make the pledges go steal copies of the tests and then they kept big file cabinets of them in their frat houses. Of course, since their daddies had jobs waiting for them at their (or friends) companies as soon as they graduated, and even if they got caught cheating, their daddies would buy them out of trouble, it didn't matter if they ever learned anything and got their grades illegally. These are now our corporate leaders.... :(


BTW, important note here:
If you are going to have sex, with either sex, make sure of two things:
1.) that the person is totally willing and is thinking clearly enough to make the decision;
2.) that you use protection against disease (and pregnancy, too, if a woman is involved).

Also, indescriminate sex cheapens the experience. It's kind of like hacking or uber-twinking. Ends up meaning nothing, but often leaves bad feelings.

Jude
 
Jude said:
Wow, this is all very good advice. I knew that! I wish I had written it. ;)

About E), though...At my university, only the lazy, rich kid, frat boys had access to something like this, and it was considered cheating. They used to make the pledges go steal copies of the tests and then they kept big file cabinets of them in their frat houses. Of course, since their daddies had jobs waiting for them at their (or friends) companies as soon as they graduated, and even if they got caught cheating, their daddies would buy them out of trouble, it didn't matter if they ever learned anything and got their grades illegally. These are now our corporate leaders.... :(
Click to expand...

Interesting difference...at mine, all you had to pay was the cost of photocopying, and the existence of the exam bank was public - heck, several of the profs encouraged us to go make use of it and made sure we knew that they were supplying copies of past year's exams to it.

Of course, we also had a policy that student evaluations of professors had an impact on tenure decisions -- and enough negative ones could lead to it being revoked -- so that might be why. :evil:
 
Having an exam bank is a good way to make the lecturers work for their pay instead of just recycling the same questions every year :wink3: . And having the same questions every time is a bit stupid too, unless you ask every single important thing every time, there might be some crucial holes in the knowledge of those passing the course, even those who get an A (or whatever the best grade happens to be), and the lecturer would never know about it unless he's also teaching the course where that knowledge is needed.

As for the cheating argument, if the questions are different, it isn't any different to having the problem sets from exercises for a subject that has those, like math, physics, etc., or a list of possible topics if the exams are more in the form of short essays. If you've learned how to answer the questions on all exams for the last 4-5 years, you know enough about the subject to pass, IMO.
 
Sumendar said:
Having an exam bank is a good way to make the lecturers work for their pay instead of just recycling the same questions every year :wink3: . And having the same questions every time is a bit stupid too, unless you ask every single important thing every time, there might be some crucial holes in the knowledge of those passing the course, even those who get an A (or whatever the best grade happens to be), and the lecturer would never know about it unless he's also teaching the course where that knowledge is needed.

As for the cheating argument, if the questions are different, it isn't any different to having the problem sets from exercises for a subject that has those, like math, physics, etc., or a list of possible topics if the exams are more in the form of short essays. If you've learned how to answer the questions on all exams for the last 4-5 years, you know enough about the subject to pass, IMO.
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Sumendar, I think that was exactly the point of the exam bank we had -- it meant fresh exams every year, as well as promoting good mastery of the material for those of us who used it.

Thanks for summing it up more succiently than I could.
 
Speaking of fraternities: don't assume you know anything about them going in. My experience with fraternities prior to going to college was what I saw in "Animal House" and "Revenge of the Nerds". Suffice it to say, I was NOT inclined to participate. I am basically an anti-snob, anti-intolerance kind of person, so I couldn't see joining a group based on exclusivity.

Luckily for me, my freshmen roommate had a different take on fraternities and I attended some Rush events with him. My school had only 12 fraternities (<3000 students) and I quickly determined that about 9 of the houses were not for me. I just didn't click with the guys there. (And yes, some of them were just as bad as I feared - or worse.) At a couple of the others I met people I really liked.

I finally decided to join one (and they decided to ask me to join) and it was the best decision in my college life. I was exposed to a lot of people with differing views, and it really made my college time broadening. (It helped that about a third of my house were foreign students.) Also, as an upper classman, I had to teach (force) myself to make small talk with freshmen during Rush, even though that wasn't really in my nature. This is perhaps the single most useful thing I learned in college, as it applies to both my business and personal life. The support of the guys who were good at that sort of thing was invaluable.

As for the exclusivity, I didn't find it to be problematic once I understood it. Basically, if you and the current membership like each other, you will get a bid. If not, you don't want to be there anyway. The key is to meet as many of the brothers in a house as possible, be yourself, and see if you get along with them.

So in short, while a fraternity (or sorority, I guess, although I really don't know much about them) may NOT be for you, don't assume it isn't until you check them out. No two houses are the same, and one may be full of D2 addicts like yourself! (Actually, my Big Brother from my fraternity is the one who got me addicted, and introduced me to purediablo.com.)

/long winded college reminiscence
 
@burke: At the university I attended first (Carnegie-Mellon), the frats were full of rich, spoiled, bullies, and I'm afraid I knew way too much about them since one year, my dorm was directly facing the fraternity row. I would get beer bottles thrown at me on the way back to my dorm sometimes, the music was blasting from 6 foot speakers set up on their porches aimed at the dorms, and there were several frats playing different music at the same time. There were always incidents of abusiveness, drunkenness (underage, too), drugging and raping girls, beating up the nerd, black kid, foreign non-white kid, whatever. The frat boys always got away with it, at most getting a reprimand with no punishment or suspension, not to mention no jail time. The campus police wouldn't do anything because, technically the frat houses were private (not campus) property, and the city police didn't want to get involved in campus matters. And their fathers would always pay off any trouble they did get into with the "boys will be boys" attitude. Basically, most of the frat boys I encountered were disgusting pigs, and that's one of the reasons I never found the animal house movies to be funny at all.

The Lesbian Avengers took to going to the "all girls welcome" frat parties in large groups (carry mace) to protect the freshman girls who naively believed that they would be meeting gentlemen. Most of those girls had the sense not to go back after encountering the drunken jerks, but that didn't stop the frat boys from thinking they could harass any woman they liked whenever they felt like it.

To be fair, there was one fraternity that was all right, amd the guys who belonged were polite and intelligent and kind. But it was mostly computer and science majors, and I don't think they even drank alcohol.

Nowadays, I've heard that it's not as bad, mainly because of civil lawsuits by the victims against the fraternities and the school. It seems that the national fraternity organizations didn't like having a bad rep, and the school didn't like losing money.

I've heard from other women (my partner, for example) that it wasn't like that at all colleges. Maybe it is worse when you have a high percentage of rich kids who think they can do whatever they like at your school.

At the second university I attended, a few years later, I didn't even notice that the frat boys existed, except for the football players, I guess. But then I didn't live on (or near campus). The school did have an incident with frat boys putting spy cameras in the girls rest rooms, and I think that frat was shut down and the boys punished. Amazing...
Jude
/my long winded college reminiscence :sad2:
 
My understanding of the difference between a college and a university was the availability of a graduate program. Universities usually have a large graduate program. These are often the bigger schools (since they have to support grads and the research they do.) You are more likely to end up with grad student TAs doing a good part of the work. Colleges either don't have a grad program, or have a small one, and try to focus on undergraduate study.

Of course, colleges and universities play with the rules of the definiations to fit the "vibe" they want for their school. My parents went to my current university when it was still a college, and snicker that they are trying to use the "university" label. Althought that's not as bad as a local junior college that calls themselves a "real" college, even with a very slim picking of 4-year majors, and most of those will require you to take classes at a real college or university, even if it's over the internet.


My first school had an "exam bank" but it was up to the professors to supply the past exams to them. So, if someone wanted to use the same exam over and over, they could just not supply it. (Of course, then the frat boys would sneak one out for more exclusive use. The main reason most professors supplied their tests -- it was more fair.) I was always annoyed by the ones that used the same test and had obsessive security rituls to keep them from leaving. The purpose of college is learning. In some cases, all you got was a posting of scores. How I am supposed to learn from my mistakes on a test if I can't really look at it after the fact and study it?


As for advice, I'm going to reiterate what a couple others have said about grades. Unless you are going on for more school, all you need is a 3.0 to head out into the workforce. It's more important that you learn than that you get all A's. The worst thing you could ever do is not take a class simply because you are afraid you can't get an A. I had one class lass semester where it was clear pretty early on that I wasn't going to get a good grade, no matter how hard I tried. I took a step back and asked myself if I was learning stuff I wanted to know in the class. I was, so the ultimate grade was irrelevant. Struggling through a class while trying your best and getting a lousy grade will be a lot more useful to you in real life than taking an easy class you can get an A in.
 
TurinT said:
A little Psych tip... when studying or listening to lectures in class, hold a pen or pencil. The act of holding a writing implement stimulates your brain, helping you take in information. This is especially good for that terrible terrible textbook reading. There is a study somewhere that supports this, I'll have to dig it up...
Click to expand...
Use differnt color inks for differnt class notes (and tests so long as the proffs don't mind)

I always used pencil for math, black ink for science, light blue for english, dark blue for forign lang and green for econ. other colors changed based on the class, but when I had one semester with 4 of my 5 classes in the same room it was about the only thing that helped me keep things seperate. Plus it helps to remember things.

edit: And I went to a small school, no frats, and it was a private University. With a college and a grad program. Goltar went to a veyr large state University, with frats that did nothing but drink and act fools with the minor exception of 2 or 3 that were professional frats, but they didn't have houses. There were no sororities, they're illegeal in Mississippi, or at least their houses are. That University had something like 12 colleges. The colloges of Areospace and Areonatoics, the Vetenary college, the Bussiness college, the college of Foresty and Land management, etc. etc.
 
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