6. YOU’RE IN COLLEGE. DON’T MESS IT UP.

THE TRANSITION FROM high school to college can be jarring, especially for students who didn’t have to work that hard in high school. Suddenly most of your day is unstructured, and it seems you can spend most of your day goofing off without any negative consequences. You can’t.

Watch Stephen Chew’s video series, How to Get the Most out of Studying: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL85708E6EA236E3DB. The six videos are between five and ten minutes each, and well worth your time. Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not necessarily the best judge of how much you’re learning, that popular study methods like highlighting the textbook are not that effective, and that good old flashcards work really well.

Spending time in the classroom will not only help you to learn the material but can help you to make a good impression on the professor. Why would you care about that? Because you’re not just after a passing grade. You need to start building relationships now that you can draw on later for job referrals and letters of recommendation.

Devote at least two hours out of class studying for every hour you spend in class

This isn’t some arbitrary rule professors made up to torture you. The credit hour is one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out of class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester [96]. This is why 12 credits can be considered a full-time load. It’s expected that in addition to the 12 hours you’re spending in class, you’re spending an additional 24 to 36 hours outside of class, studying and doing homework.

Keep on top of relevant news in your industry and take every opportunity to enhance your general knowledge. Being well-informed will help you in the classroom and in the workplace, and will make your world a more interesting place to live in. Podcasts are a timesaver. You can listen while you are driving or doing chores. Some general-interest podcasts that are informative and not boring are Planet Money, 99% Invisible, The Constant, Make Me Smart, Stuff You Should Know, and Stuff You Missed in History Class.

Your part-time retail or work-study job is certainly work, and it might have aspects that

look good on a resume. But the kind of job you are likely to have in college won’t give you professional experience. This is where internships come in. (Internship-like experiences might also be called externships or co-ops.) Go to your school’s internship or career office, if you have one.

If you don’t have one already, create a LinkedIn account. Because you’re still a student, it’s appropriate to use your .edu email account. When you graduate and transition into the workforce, you will want to use an email account set aside for professional use.

Look for job and internship openings that interest you. Copy several of them and paste the text into a file. Open a word cloud generator like tagcrowd.com or wordclouds.com. Paste in the text from the ads you’ve collected and generate your word cloud. See if you can work the “big” words into your profile.

Make sure to fill out all the sections including Courses, Projects, Languages, Certifications, and Organizations.

Start building your network while you’re still in college. Use LinkedIn to connect with your professors, classmates, and acquaintances. Because LinkedIn is a professional network, not a social one, people will tend to react positively to a connection request. Explore LinkedIn’s Company pages linkedin.com/company and resources for students at

It’s safest to avoid social media entirely, but that may not be realistic. In any case, don’t post, email, or write anything you wouldn’t want the world to see. Avoid politics (not all employers will share your views). Don’t post pictures of yourself in costume. A topical costume may seem funny at the time, but may not age well.

Don’t post anything about drug use or drinking. Drinking alcohol is perfectly legal if you are of age, but that didn’t stop a teacher from losing her job over a private Facebook photo [97].

This is one of the vacation photos that got schoolteacher Ashley Payne fired to “voluntarily” resign from Apalachee HS in Georgia. She sued, and lost.

Twitter makes it easy—maybe too easy—to post your thoughts. Tweeting before thinking can be a career-killer [98]. Even if all your tweets are perfectly proper, marketers (with the help of IBM) can infer your personality traits from your Twitter profile. See what others can see at personality-insights-demo.ng.bluemix.net/