On my Tumblr thingy, someone asked:
I know it’s been a bit since you were in school, but as someone who is about to go to university, do you have any tips?
I wanted to share my reply:
It is such a huge privilege when someone your age asks an Old like me for advice. When I was young, I thought dudes in their 50s were lame and had nothing to offer. Now that I’m one of those dudes, I understand what a gift it is when you ask me to share my experience. I hope this helps you a little bit.
Make time to meet your professors during their office hours.
You don’t have to go have a deep conversation, just introduce yourself, tell them which class you are in, and thank them for their time.
You’re doing this because there will be a time in your future when you need an extra day for something, or a little extra help or attention, or something like that. When you go to talk to your professor about that, it won’t be the first time you’ve met them, and that will make a difference.
That’s on an academic level. On a personal level, you’re going to spend a LOT of the next few years figuring out who you are, what your values are, and how you want to live your life. Most of us try to be someone profoundly different from who we are, in our first year or two, because we’re on our own and trying out what it feels like to be an adult. The thing I want you to just remember while you do that is: you know who your are in your heart, and if you try to not be that person, you will draw people to you who don’t like *you* as much as they like who you are pretending to be.
It’s a long way of saying “be true to yourself. Know what your values are and live them consistently, so you find other people who share them.”
Finally, the advice I give everyone who asks me questions like yours:
Choose to be kind.
Choose to be honest.
Choose to be honorable.
Choose to do your best and understand that your best will vary from day to day. Don’t judge yourself when your best on Monday is not the same as it was last Thursday. Just do your best, consistently.
You’re at the beginning of a really great time in your life. I hope you get everything you want out of it, enjoy learning, and make life long friends.
I am an academic advisor at a university, and I want to say thank you for these excellent words. I hope lots of people take them to heart.
Well said!
As a professor myself, this is 100% the best academic advice. I often have an assignment to come to my office hours and answer some basic questions just for the reason you give amongst others!
Specifically about being a student, I’d add that they should not just deal with the assignment in front of them. Learn how to learn. This is a gift that will pay off for the rest of your life.
Yes, exactly what have been telling our kids. Oh one more: say hello to your librarian. They hold the keys to the collegiate universe (or at least the most comfortable study lounge).
As a librarian, seconding this. We can often make your study and research time much less frustrating if you actually talk to us.
You never know who you will need something from later in life. Be nice, because one of those 100+ people could change your life.
100% this. Being nice not only feels good and makes others feel good, it opens doors you didn’t even know were there.
My wife is a community college biology professor and yes, every word is exactly on-point.
Additional:
The old paradigm of individual academic competitiveness (i.e.: “look around you – half of you will fail) is largely out of date. We’re seeing much better outcomes, holistically as well as academically, when students collaborate outside of class to learn the material. Treat your classmates as teammates instead of competitors and you’ll have a much better time overall!
As a professor, the bit about office hours is so important. Meet with me, be honest with me about what’s going on, and I will bend over backwards to help you. I can’t help if you don’t ask. You won’t ask because it’s awkward. Get the awkward out of the way by dropping by to introduce yourself.
This is right on. Once upon a time I taught (adjunct) at a university and it was always SO nice to have students come to office hours – if only just to know that what we were doing in the classroom was related somewhere/somehow to their thoughts and reality outside the classroom.
I firmly believe in the fact we all have our genius. A class is just a class but hopefully the human connections we get to make as students and teachers help us find that genius. Plus have a good time.
Nice. Talk to your profs is something that would never have occurred to me to pass along; I certainly never did that as a student and probably should have. 🙂
“Ask for help, especially from your professors” is probably the closest I would come up with. What I can’t figure out how to phrase well is “make lots of mistakes: it may seem like making mistakes in college will have huge repercussions, but college is a very safe space to make mistakes”, because it’s not like I want to advise uni-bound people to be knuckleheads. Maybe I should just fall back on the Man in the Arena speech, and say: do this, dare mighty things, be it taking a class, asking someone out, going to an audition, volunteering to be a leader in lab or a student group, or as Wil says, choosing to be nice.
We’ve always told our kids “you’re gonna make mistakes, because you are human. The important thing is to learn how to make SMALL mistakes, not BIG mistakes.” 🙂
My son is going to college next month and I’ve been putting together thoughts to send to him when he leaves on my phone. I’m going to add a lot of this to it and I’ll make sure he knows you came up with them.
Don’t miss out on your personal Boothby.
I am the type of person who will talk to anyone and I have very diverse interests – even though I was an engineering student I was always friendly to the support staff (who often had a liberal arts background) and was interested in their interests (art, music, archeology, theater, etc.) and people in other fields. Many became “work friends” and one became part of my “chosen family.”
I had a secretary make a passing comment that changed the course of my life.
I had a project administrator (for a project I was not on) call in a favor to clear up a frustrating bureaucracy problem for me.
I had a dean (that I had chatted with at an event) interceded on a registrar/bursar error that resulted in a blame denial standoff that caused the bursar to threaten sending a collection agency after me for thousands of dollars.
Another bit of advice is to use your class options and open electives to explore topics you are curious about that are not directly related to your major – besides the personal enrichment, one never knows how that knowledge might help you in the future.
I learned a lot from:
– a political science seminar taught by a former white house science advisor who told many stories about the real world.
– an award winning documentary filmmaker who showed us the before and after versions of a documentary that was taken from him and re-edited to be “more exciting” (turned from inciteful and touching into trashy exploitation) by the studio.
– a “plays as literature” course that let you be crew for a play in lieu of a paper – I learned how a poor director views the crew as unworthy of his time and focuses only on his darling actors. [I was the whole lighting crew – the complete director input for the lighting was “here’s the script.”(Aristophanes – “Frogs”) I did my best, but it was my interpretation, not the director’s]
– a business course that showed how the problems are often not where they appear to be.
– an economics course that showed me that the numbers often lie.
[There were also a lot of science/engineering experiences that resulted from being friendly beyond academic requirements.]
I’m convinced that 90% of academic success in college is simply doing the work. I had a friend who was a biology major like myself and she had an IQ that was off the charts higher than mine. College was the first time she experienced life outside of her controlling parents and she relished the social aspects of college, but she started skipping classes and missing assignments. By sophmore year she dropped out and was literally selling magazines for a living. I’m not saying don’t have fun and meet interesting people, just make sure you are on top of your work. However, if you have the chance to see They Might Giants using free tickets your roomate picked up at the college radio station and you instead study for an organic chemistry quiz, well that is a mistake you will regret for the rest of your life. 🙂
AW MAN. My sympathies. (Re: TMBG)
„And don’t be a dick“
I would also add (as a nearly 50 year old bouncer who has been in the game since I was 16) when you start going to bars. Don’t mess with the bouncers. If you do rock up to a club with a fake ID, and they catch it, just let it go, take the L, grab a pizza on the way home, and go play some X-Box with some friends. You’ll have just as much fun, and that bouncer will forget you. If you make a big deal, we never forget you, and when you do show up at 21, we’ll tell you to kick rocks. Also, if there’s a problem in a bar, just tell the bouncer. We live for removing creeps. We want people to have a good time. We want people to be safe. Incidents = Paperwork. If we can ask someone to leave before a problem starts, everyone wins.
TL/DR: When you go to a club, remember the bouncers are there to help.
P.S.: I admit that there’s a bunch of unprofessional jerkweeds who should be bouncers, so if a place has a bunch of them, pick a different club.
Thanks Wil! Wish someone had shared something like that to me 40 years ago after I started school after my Navy service. Very well thought, sincere and positively on point. Golden!
Advise well given! May I add that as a college professor I see way too many students shy away from hard work. When you accomplish something you struggled with, you will remember it better and it will not only teach you about that material but about yourself and the way you learn. Anything important you do in life requires time and energy and professors are much more likely to reach out when they see that kind of effort.
YOU’RE NOT OLD. Because if you’re old, then I’m old. And I’m surely not old.
On another note… be careful and minimal with loans and credit card offers. Every shark on the planet knows that many people entering college are A) functioning mostly independent of their family for the first time, and B) Now old enough to enter into financial contracts. They will hit you from every direction with some version of “Once you’re out of school you’ll have an awesome job, and won’t even notice the payments…” The shopping bags at my college bookstore used to have credit card applications preinserted into every one. Every bank in the city would have a table at every event, etc.
What dis Skool thing?