Surviving and Thriving
in Post-Secondary Education
Getting Settled in New Surroundings
Let’s assume that you have made the jump and decided to go to university (the largest group of you), college (the second largest) or a polytech (a smaller number but growing fast). Hopefully, you’ve done the work necessary to determine which path is right for you and then completed the preparatory work that we outlined in the previous chapter. Now you’ve just been dropped off at your new residence, have boarded a bus to a campus far from home, or are setting up study space in your parents’ basement. So, what’s next? What do you have to look forward to? How can you best adjust to a strange and challenging environment?
The three types of institutions named above are not the same, and their programs differ greatly. Small, elite programs pay a great deal more attention to you than mass-enrollment, first-year courses at big universities. Small campuses are more welcoming. College, on the other hand, is more like high school — particularly if you attend the one close to home. Expect to see some of the high school crowd, smallish classes, and much less intensity than at a university. Polytechs are like universities, but with higher energy and much more focus on applied and practical work. You will be doing things right away at a polytech and finding your feet more slowly at a university.
The advice that follows is fairly generic — although it applies best to the university and polytech environment and less so to colleges. The jump in standards and expectations is much greater between high school and university and polytechs than it is between high school and a college — depending, of course, on the particular program you are in. University campus life is more complex and all-encompassing than what you will find at a polytech or a college, with many more rituals, ceremonies, and traditions. But even that varies. A high-intensity polytech, like Sheridan, has much more of a buzz than an access-oriented university like York or the University of Toronto, Scarborough. If you’ve chosen to further your education at any of these places, dig in and have fun. Capitalize on opportunities, make new friends, participate in campus life, and absorb the intellectual and professional benefits of the place. You are off on a very different kind of adventure.
Here’s a decision that will have a huge effect on your university experience: should you live at home — assuming that there is a university in your community — or should you go away somewhere and live in a university residence, or an off-campus apartment? We’ve had both experiences, since one of us did live at home as an undergraduate, while the other went to a university a long way from his home community. On the whole, we recommend going away, but there’s no question that living at home is cheaper — assuming your parents don’t charge you rent — and there’s not as much of a break in your social life (something that has disadvantages too). But if you can possibly afford to do so, we think you should go to a different community and even a different province. We won’t belabour this point here, since we make it in several places, but it’s a decision that comes with choosing a university.
Financials
When it comes to the question of costs, you will read different estimates. Polytechs and colleges generally have lower fees for most programs — though these, too, are changing. Our estimates for universities are based on the online cost editor for McMaster University,[1] which is representative of Canadian universities outside Quebec. In Quebec, fees are much lower (but only for residents of the province, so if you are from Ontario, you can’t save money by going to McGill). The basic tuition fee varies according to province; for McMaster it is about $6,500 a year for arts and science students and just under $9,000 for business students. Then there are various extra fees — such as compulsory student and athletic fees (McMaster includes them in the tuition figure). Residence costs also vary, but a double room with washroom is $5,400, and a meal plan is $3,135 (more for big eaters). McMaster reckons $1,200 for books (which seems hard to believe and, in fact, varies a lot between programs — but some science texts are amazingly expensive).
McMaster estimates $1,000 for “personal expenses” and $1,000 for “entertainment,” which isn’t very much spread over eight months; you’d have to live a pretty spartan life to get away with that. The total is over $18,000. The figure of $15,000 is often given in estimates of how much university costs, but given the breakdown on the McMaster website, the higher figure seems, if anything, rather low. Note that this does not include the cost of running a car; if you have one, you might spend $20,000 a year. If you finish in four years, you will have spent $80,000; if it takes you five, something that is quite common, you are looking at $100,000.
A hundred thousand dollars! It won’t be any comfort to hear that, at the most expensive American universities, the cost of tuition and board alone has now passed $60,000 a year — as much as $300,000 for your degree! This is a sum that seems out of most peoples’ reach, and is a reason that student debt is such a crushing burden in the United States. Even these days $100,000 is a great deal of money. It has to be paid too — the university won’t release your transcript or let you graduate until you have paid every last penny. And, if you leave without a degree and owing money, they may put the debt collection agencies on your trail. Perhaps your parents have money in a RESP, but they are unlikely to have that much in it. Perhaps they are wealthy and can simply cut cheques every year — some are, and if this is the case, you are lucky. If you live at home for free, you can save about $8,500 a year — or something approaching half the total cost, which is a big reason why so many students do this.
Why, you ask, shouldn’t the government pay for it? After all, your education is a benefit to society, especially if you are studying something useful and practical such as medicine or civil engineering. The traditional argument is that, even if you are studying something that is not particularly useful to society (say Latin and ancient Greek literature), your education makes you a better person, and this is to everyone’s benefit. True enough, but the counter-argument is that your education also benefits you — because, on average (but only on average), it gives you a better salary than you would get without it. This isn’t Cuba, where doctors make the same as street sweepers, so perhaps you should pay something up-front for your more prosperous future. Thirty years ago, governments paid about 80 percent of the cost of running universities; then they started shifting the burden to students, who now pay about half the total cost. Short of marching in the streets Quebec-style, this is not likely to change.
Perhaps you can get some financial help. Scholarships and bursaries are both money that the university or other sources give you; the difference between them is that the first are based on academic achievement, while the second are based on need. At McMaster, the university gives three levels of “Entrance Awards” to everyone based on high school averages, ranging from $500 for 80 percent to $1,000 at 90 percent. If you get 95 percent or more, a figure that would have been impossible in the baby boomer days unless you were a mathematician on the level of Stephen Hawking, but is more common now, the award is $2,500. There are also in-course scholarships, and other ones donated by outside groups that give awards to the children of veterans and the like.
Bursaries come with a wide requirement of sums and conditions, but generally go to students who demonstrate need. Ontario has an interesting one called the “First Generation Bursary” for students whose parents did not attend a post-secondary institution. There are all sorts of external bursaries, and it will certainly be to your advantage to do a thorough search for them. But unless you are an outstanding genius and win some sort of full-ride scholarship, you will still have to come up with a substantial amount of money. It may help to be an excellent athlete, since Canadian universities do, contrary to what most people think, give some financial help to star players. However, the limit a student athlete can receive in Ontario is $4,000,[2] which is why institutions in the northern American states are full of Canadians on hockey scholarships.
You are going to have to live on a budget. Sorry, we know that budgeting is a pain, but there’s a big reason for doing it: you don’t want to come out of university with a huge student debt if you can possibly avoid doing so. In 2012 half of graduating university students had debt, and the average amount for those who had it was $28,000.[3] This means that some students carried $10,000 in debt, and some more than $40,000. Our favourite horror story about student debt is the American woman who wanted all her life to be a veterinarian, so much so that she borrowed money to take her degree at an institution in the Caribbean. Now thirty and working at the Caring Hearts Animal Clinic in Gilbert, Arizona, she owes the American government $312,000, money that, unlike other debt, cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and will dog her (sorry) all her life.[4] This won’t happen to you, though, unless of course like her you take a degree at the Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine on the island of St. Kitts and borrow heavily to pay for it.
Unlike the American system, which will hound (sorry again) the vet forever, the Canadian system allows you to default on your student loan, and there are websites that advise students how to deal with financial difficulties. But you don’t want to do this; it’s a dog’s life (blush), it’s not very responsible, it’s bad for your credit, and you will eventually want to borrow money to buy a house, something that’s difficult to do if your credit rating is bad. Even if you pay the loan off on time, as most students do, it’s no fun starting life owing $28,000 or more. You could buy a pretty nice car for that amount. This is no time to suffer the remorseless logic of compound interest.
You need to ask yourself how much you need a car, or an iPad — Android tablets are cheaper and just as good — or lots of other consumer items. If you have a student loan, everything you buy is essentially on credit, though admittedly at a much better rate than the credit card companies will give you. You have to have some fun — why not a ski trip to Whistler? — but you have to consider whether it’s worth adding to your debt load. If, on the other hand, you have the money and are debt-free, then laissez les bons temps rouler (as long as your assignments are in on time).
It’s also possible that your parents can’t afford much help, you don’t have a scholarship, you don’t want to burden yourself with debt, and yet you want to go to university. How are you going to manage this? Traditionally, the answer was a summer job and, indeed, it used to be possible to make enough money between the first of May and Labour Day to pay tuition, books, and part of the room and board. Almost everyone could do this, and those with connections could get an industrial job that saw them come back to campus with a substantial amount of money. For some lucky students, this still works, but not many of you are going to find a job that pays $18,000 over the summer. You could, of course, get a full-time job for a year or more and save like a beaver for university expenses. This takes a great deal of self-discipline, but some students do it, and it’s a really good idea.
The usual answer to this is to take a part-time job. It used to be that poverty-stricken students would be hired by the university to wait on tables in the dining room and do similar jobs, but these are usually done by outside workers nowadays. The common solution is to get a job in a restaurant or bar (in the days when the drinking age was twenty-one, this was not possible). The statistics on this are startling: Maclean’s magazine in January 2012 quoted a Canadian University Consortium study to the effect that 56 percent of students work for wages during the university year, an average of eighteen hours a week. Nearly a fifth of them work more than thirty hours.[5] That’s twice as many hours tending bar as spent in class for a traditional five-course lecture-based program. Are you a student working in a bar — serving tables or tending bar — to the point where it seems as though you’re taking classes in your spare time? Sometimes it’s difficult to tell.
Pity the student who has to do this, who has to spend thirty or even forty hours working, for example, in the “Ceeps” (the CPR hotel in London, Ontario, favourite watering hole of Western students).[6] Add to this fifteen hours in class. University people say that you should plan to spend three hours working on a course for every hour of class time. For an arts program, with typically around fifteen classroom hours a week, this translates into a forty-five-hour-per-week commitment. For a heavy science program, add an extra ten to fifteen hours. And you haven’t had any fun yet, to say nothing of sleep or social interaction. Somehow many students who figure that they can do a full course load and take on a full-time job wonder why things are not working out so well. This is the kind of pressure that makes students drop out of university, and is an important reason why so many take more than four years to finish their degree.
Worse still, such a work and study schedule leaves no time at all for one of the greatest things about being a university student, which is the opportunity to go off on trips of self-discovery. If you are in class or labs fifteen hours a week, and spend another thirty working on term papers, course readings and other assignments, and if you don’t have an outside job, you have a huge amount of spare time to go and hear guest speakers, play touch football, join student organizations and clubs—the choir, the Society for Creative Anachronism, political organizations, charitable, and volunteer groups. Above all you have all that wonderful time to learn stuff outside of the classroom and outside of your required reading and assignments.
Why not choose the debt-free route? Yeah, yeah, you’re thinking — easy for you guys to say. What’s the answer? Where is the money to come from? Well, we can’t prescribe for you, but what we would do in a situation where we had no money is not take out huge loans, and not kill ourselves and ruin the university experience by working ourselves ragged. What we would do is the third option suggested. We would take as much time off between high school and university as we needed to get together enough money to see us through the degree. You are going to have to pay the money back eventually; why not get it up-front and enjoy your university years? You may well have a better experience if you come to university at twenty-one instead of eighteen in any case.
Learning Opportunities beyond the Classroom
There’s the library, with hundreds of thousands or millions of books, depending on where you are, most of them unavailable on the Web. You can wander down the stacks and find interesting stuff that will grab your attention.
Then there’s the famous chemistry professor, Dr. Whatshisname, the Nobel Prize winner, lecturing to a class of graduate students. Perhaps you can slip in to the back of the class and listen to him. Here’s David Suzuki or Ann Coulter giving a public lecture (well, not Coulter: the president of the University of Ottawa caved to pressure and banned her). Go and hear it.
All this you can do if you aren’t spending thirty hours a week slinging suds.
Give this some serious thought. You’ve been at school for twelve years, and you have four more to go in university. If you wait a couple of years and save your money you will have a far better university experience in every respect: you will be more mature, you will have more real world experience, and you won’t have to wait on tables or serve beer in a pub. It’s surprising that more young people don’t do this. Perhaps they think that if they don’t go to university at eighteen they will lose the will to go, and will never do so. But if the impulse is that weak, perhaps they weren’t meant to go in the first place.
What is Your Plan B?
We have noted elsewhere that only a very small minority of people who express interest in medicine actually get into medical school. (Of those who do get in, almost all graduate, because the entrance standards are so high that no one who gets in is incapable of doing the work.) It must be terribly disappointing to be rejected, especially for those who have been answering “doctor” to the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” since they were old enough to talk. Some try more than once and do eventually get in. Others go to the kind of offshore medical school that landed that poor American vet $300,000 in hock to the government.
Some will go elsewhere in the medical field, into nursing or medical research, while some will go into other branches of science. Some will choose other fields entirely, and some will simply drop out. The point is that you need a plan B. Given the success rate for medical school applications it would be foolish to put yourself in a situation where you’ve invested two or more years in something that comes crashing down around your ears, leaving you with no idea of what to do next. One solution is to take courses that will be useful in medically related fields. For instance, business courses might help if you want to make a career in the pharmaceutical industry. Perhaps you could become a high school science teacher. In any case, don’t leave yourself open to disaster like a deer caught in headlights. Plan for contingencies.
You’re not in High School Anymore
This seems obvious, but think about what it means. It means that you are now on your own in a number of ways. The most important of these is that, by and large, university instructors are not going to compel you to do anything. Most notably, very few of them take attendance, so that if you want to skip class, there is no immediate penalty. No bad conduct marks, no going to the principal’s office, no detention, no expulsion. What freedom, and what a wonderful change from high school. You will find that the absence of the police/prison guard atmosphere that is so much a part of school life makes all the difference in the world. Being responsible for your own success (or failure) through self-discipline (or lack of it) is what distinguishes you as a young adult from the child you used to be not so many months ago.
But of course there’s a corollary. If you don’t come to class, and there are marks for class participation, you will get nothing. If you miss the deadline for handing in a term paper, you will be severely docked or will get nothing — unless the instructor is a pushover, as some of them are. If you skip labs, you will get nothing. You aren’t in the Edmonton school system anymore, the one that decreed that teachers could not assign zero grades, even if students had done nothing at all, on ridiculously stupid pedagogical grounds. A hint, though, comes from the chair of the Edmonton school board, who said it was the board’s policy “to entice students to perform as effectively as possible.”[7] Entice — what a lovely word. Well, no one is going to entice you to complete course requirements at university. There they are, do them or not, and take the consequences. A bit scary, but liberating.
You have other new freedoms too. Assuming you are living in residence, you can sleep in as long as you like, party till dawn (assuming you don’t break the noise regulations), change your clothes every day or never, eat residence food (everyone complains about it), drink and experiment with dodgy substances with no parents tut-tutting. Some people overdo aspects of this (see below on booze and drugs), some people make many friends, some people isolate themselves and are unhappy. It’s up to you. No one will run your life for you. You’re not in high school anymore.
Stay in Residence, and Get a Roommate
Living in residence is more expensive than living with Mom and Dad, but we think that you should have the residence experience if you can possibly afford to do so. We don’t think you should live in an off-campus apartment in the first couple of years; that can be a very isolating experience. In fact, some of the elite American universities, Duke for example, require all first-year students (they still call them freshmen) to live on campus in residence.
We make this recommendation for several reasons. An important one is that it gets you out of your parents’ house. You are aware of the meme (an English-prof word that means an idea or belief that spreads through a culture) of the unemployed college graduate in his or her thirties still living in Mommy and Daddy’s basement, an object of derision and scorn. You don’t want to end up that way (so you’d better start planning your future carefully right now), and really, the sooner you cut the umbilical cord, the better. Living at home prolongs your adolescence and delays your transition into adulthood. You don’t want that, do you?
Naturally there will be exceptions. There are people who for cultural reasons will be more closely bound to their families, and will live at home till marriage, and thus would not dream of going to live in a university in a residence. There are others who for one reason or another need more family support than they will get living in a university residence. This advice is not directed at them.
You should get a roommate too; in fact, some universities will not put first-year students in single rooms. Your first reaction may be to say “but what if the roommate is loud/a drunk/annoying/a nerd/smelly, etc.?” If your roommate is truly horrible, abusive, or some sort of psycho, you can always ask to be moved — but the point is that part of your adult life is learning to get along with all kinds of people. You are a devout Christian, and your roommate is an atheist. You are an intellectual, and your roommate is a hockey jock. You are a neat freak, and your roommate is a slob, or vice versa. How are you going to get through the year? Well, that’s the whole point: you are going to have to find some way of getting through it — with patience, accommodation, or negotiation.
You really want to get away from the “helicopter parent” situation, so called because these people hover over their university-aged “children” like search-and-rescue helicopters over crash victims. They register for their children in their children’s names; they phone the registrar’s office to see how their kids are doing (by law, the office can’t give out information). They phone the instructors to ask why their kids didn’t get an A on their last term paper. Unbelievable, you say. But it’s true, and it’s getting more common all the time. Do you want to stay at home and be smothered in that way?
There are new friends to be made in residence. Some people who live with their parents while at university tend to hang around with the old high school crowd, people who are living with their own parents. In a university residence you will make not only new friends, but ones from a much greater variety of backgrounds than your old neighbourhood. This is valuable not only as a means of broadening your circle of friends and your horizons generally, but also as a great means of making contacts that will be useful in your later life. Imagine that you are in the business program, and down the hall in residence is a student whose father is a vice-president of the Bank of Montreal. You are interested in art, and your roommate’s mother is a conservator at the National Gallery of Canada. What a terrific resource! Such things happen more often than you would think, particularly at the higher-rated universities.
Not only should you live in residence, but you should seriously consider asking to room with an international student. This is one of these win-win situations where you do a good deed but get a big reward in return. The good deed part is obvious: a great many international students are seriously deficient in English, especially spoken English, despite having taken English as a Second Language courses. They are just as adrift in Canada as you would be in Punjab with only a shaky knowledge of Punjabi. Everything about Canada is strange to them, and some of it is frightening. Imagine coming direct from Amritsar to Saskatoon, especially if you start in January.
You can do a really good deed and get lots of good karma (as your grandparents used to say) by helping a student like this navigate a strange and new country. Some international students hang around exclusively with students from their own country, which is a really bad idea — most importantly because it reduces their chance to practise English with native speakers. If they room with you, they will have no choice but to speak English, though you may learn some Punjabi or Urdu or Cantonese as well.
But there’s something in this for you too, other than good karma. Remember why you are at university. We hope you are there to broaden your horizons and learn as much as you can about the world. Some students are, while others are just there for job reasons. Getting to know a student from another country really well is a tremendously broadening experience, especially if you are from a part of the country without a large immigrant population. But even from a more practical perspective, becoming a good friend of someone from, say, Hong Kong or Japan can have all sorts of benefits. Wouldn’t it be fun to spend a year or two in a Japanese or a Chinese city learning the language and working as an intern for some commercial firm, or teaching? Think of all the benefits that might flow from this. If your roommate isn’t able to help you in this, he or she may know someone who can. Doesn’t this sound more interesting than going back to your home town and teaching elementary school at the same place you went to? You can always do that later if you really want to — and, in any case, there’s a huge oversupply of teachers these days and it’s really tough to get a job.
Don’t Blow Off Orientation
Almost all universities have an “orientation week” in which first-time students are given tours of the facilities, with talks by academic, residence, and student activities administrators. Of course your eyes may roll at the thought of someone walking you through the library, but it’s worth taking the tour. Libraries are much different than they were twenty years ago, when they were simply repositories for huge numbers of books and periodicals. The old file-card cabinets have been replaced by computer terminals, and the people behind the desks are highly computer-savvy, able to direct you to valuable online resources that you will need in your research. It’s good to know where the health services office is before you need it, how the cafeteria system works, what the student government can do for you, what the residence rules are, what athletic facilities are available (some places have amazing facilities that rival those of the fanciest health club), and so on. All this is well worth the time you spend on it.
If you are in residence, you can use these days to get to know your roommate. If he or she is truly awful, you can switch, though the residence authorities are reluctant to do this, and are likely to ask you to give the situation some time. This is when you get to know people who may end up being your friends for life, and it is a serious mistake to skip this period and come to campus the day before classes start. We won’t guarantee that every moment of orientation will be golden: the person who gives the little talk on how the university’s grading system works may be a total bore. But, on the whole, orientation is very much worthwhile. Don’t blow it off.
Time Management: Self-Managed Learning
You will hear about this during orientation, but it bears repeating: time management is essential for success at university, and it is vitally important that you pay attention from the first day of classes onward with regards to how you spend your time. Very few of you did this in high school, but this is another place where university is different from what went before: you absolutely cannot afford to goof off during the academic year. The best thing to do is to get a day-timer — a calendar where you keep track of what you are doing — so that you won’t forget when your classes are, and when your assignments are due. You can get paper ones, but probably a good digital one would be best or just make use of your smartphone’s calendar app, if you have one. We assume everyone has a laptop; ten years ago very few of you did, but times change, and a computer and smartphone are now essential. You should set aside a certain time of the day for study, and plan ahead for a big push for assignments of various kinds.
You need to know what you are doing for the week ahead, day by day, and for the month ahead, and for the whole semester. You should allocate your time as though you were getting paid by the hour. Of course you want to socialize, but you have to set aside time for study as a priority.
We know some eyes will roll at this advice. You think it’s nerdy to have a day-timer like some compulsive high school dweeb sucking up for grades. Certainly if you are at university just to party, or to kill time, and you don’t care about grades, you shouldn’t bother. If you are working in a pub forty hours a week we don’t really know what to say to you, since you probably have every minute of the week allocated already. But you have to realize, though we’ve said it several times already, that Canadian universities are swarming with students, most of them aiming at the kind of career you want, and there are not nearly enough places in these careers for all who want them. Therefore it is essential that you take every step possible to distinguish yourself from the swarm.
The point of time management is to arrange things so that you do your best possible work. To lose grades because you are rushed on your assignments is a great shame, and will have a bad effect on your academic and work career. Be aware, too, that the first month is the most important one, so you need to take it seriously from the first day.
Our favourite piece of advice for students is to make the first month of every academic year work for you. We focus on this first month for two reasons. First, because focusing on the first month generates real results. Second, because very close to 100 percent of all students ignore the suggestion. You will arrive in school in early September. The first few days will be taken up with orientation. Smart students will take the academic part of it seriously and go easy on the social, boozy part. Then classes begin.
Most students take a full load of five semester-long classes, each with its own set of classes, seminars, labs, readings, and assignments. The course syllabi you collect the first week are quite daunting but, hey, you have four months, so what’s the worry? The answer is that there is a lot to worry about. Here is what most students do — they procrastinate. No one is watching and monitoring your progress. Few professors provided much scheduling advice. A few smart or lucky students will be in residences with mentor dons who can guide them through the perils of first year, but the majority will be on their own.
As you go through the course assignments, you will see a bunch of essays, projects, reports, and summaries that you have to do. Even if you were reasonably conscientious in high school, you actually have no idea of how long it takes to write a university-standard assignment, which the professor says must be 3,000 words long and have at least fifteen academic sources. (By the way, it’s a very bad idea to use Wikipedia as an academic source in university assignments. It’s wonderful for looking up facts, but unreliable for modern contentious subjects — the entry on George W. Bush used to change every day — and using it will make your instructors think you are a lightweight.)
But, what the heck, that is only one paper. There is also, of course, the psychology mid-term, the three English papers (each requiring you to read a novel or play first), four biology lab reports and a mid-term, and the weekly assignments in first-year German. Some classes require weekly readings. One of us taught a semester at an American university where senior history classes required students to read 250 pages a week, and they were quizzed and graded in class on their reading. Work stacks up — that is the bad news — but it is all down the line — and that’s the really bad news.
Most first-year students procrastinate. They put off their assignments until, in a mad rush, they struggle to cope with mid-term examinations and essays and reports and other work — all in the second half of the semester. The first half, meanwhile, has been left largely work-free. This pattern is as predictable as a Saskatchewan winter, with students panicking in late October and early November, requesting extensions (most profs say no, though some softies will give you one), pulling “all-nighters” in a desperate attempt to keep up with deadline (a really bad idea: how clearly do you think at 3 a.m.?), and watching their grade point average plummet in a flurry of poorly written essays and mediocre projects. The library, largely empty in September, is swarming with students in mid-semester, many of them frantically searching for the same books.
The solution is so elegant and so easy that it is remarkable more students do not adopt this strategy. Well, actually, it’s not that remarkable, since it runs against most people’s basic instincts to put tasks off. Start your assignments early. Go through all of the work that you have to do in the semester. Determine which essays or reports can be done right away and which ones have to be done at specific times in the course. Do as many of the assignments as you can in September. The library will be largely empty. The books and materials you want will be on the shelves. Librarians and writing centre staff have lots of time to help you. You are not otherwise busy. Get at the least the first draft done right away. You can always go back and revise the papers closer to the deadlines.
Following this advice will set you on a manageable path to academic success (assuming that the essays are properly written and researched). You will avoid the post-Thanksgiving panic, your work will be more carefully presented, you will experience much less stress than your classmates, and you might even be able to enjoy the work. Ignoring this advice, and we know that the swarm will do so, will leave you with a very relaxed six-week period, followed by an intense and stressful second half of the semester. Most students never quite get the logic of this approach, continuing the pattern of coasting and crisis semester after semester
So, take this as the first test of your ability to respond to good advice. Tackle your first-semester work like a military campaign. Plan ahead, develop a workable strategy, apply yourself early, work consistently, and capitalize on the full semester’s worth of time and opportunity. But we smile as we write this. If we have learned anything from watching students over the years, it is that you do not, as a group, plan very well, are not strategic in your approach to university life, and somehow believe that a panic-stricken race to complete ten assignments in three weeks will miraculously produce top-notch work. Big sigh.
Don’t skip classes, even the boring ones (and some will be so boring that you will want to drive spikes into your ears — we would be lying to you if we told you that all your instructors will be excellent). We are thinking of non-science courses now — but, of course, you won’t skip labs if you are in science. In lecture courses, take notes that are as extensive as possible. They can be useful for study, and in our undergraduate days we found that if we wrote down as much as we could, it helped us to remember the material, and made studying for exams much easier. For heaven’s sake, if you are going to bring a laptop to class, don’t search Facebook on it. Either use it for note-taking, or turn it off. If you are surfing the Web, you will annoy the instructor, and for all the good the class will do you, you might as well have stayed in bed.
The Mathematics of First-Year Assignments
You will have x number of papers to write. The papers will, on average, take you y number of hours (and y is about three times larger than what you did in high school, because you can’t just make it all up out of your head, like a story — you have to substantiate your facts through research). Make note of this and plan accordingly.
You must, therefore, find xy hours in order to complete your assignments over the course of three months. You can spread this out over all of September to early December (the smart way to operate) or you can delay starting your work and cram it all into the last six weeks of the semester — the standard modus operandi for first-year students. But these students are the swarm, and you don’t want to be part of that, do you?
Making the Most of the First Year
In most programs you will have some choice of courses and, as well as taking the courses you will need to get into the major of your choice, you should seriously consider taking one course a semester in a field you know little about. This is a great way of deciding on a field you want to concentrate on for the rest of your undergraduate career. We don’t mean that Arts students should take organic chemistry, but they might consider a course in an area they have never studied: sociology, psychology, natural resources, and so forth. Scope them out first, because you have to balance taking courses that will interest you and challenge you against the necessity of keeping your grades up. If taking a course in, say, ancient Egyptology sounds like a grade killer, you can audit it, usually for half the course fee, or just slip in and listen to some of the lectures. Maybe you will get turned on by the difference between hieroglyphic and demotic script and make it your life’s work. You will never know if you don’t sample.
How’d You Like to Trade Places with Us?
You know something? Talking about this with you in this way is making us a little envious.
You are going to have a great time at university if you take the right steps to prepare yourself. We wish that we could follow you to campus as young students once again, especially now that we know how to make the system work.
Tell you what: let’s switch roles — you be old geezers, and we’ll take your place, draw up a study schedule, join some clubs, go out for the track team, and yes, have a great social life (we’ll get to that shortly). What do you say? Fair trade?
Here are a few other ways to make the most of your first and other years:
• Attend public events. When politicians or other famous people come to campus, go and listen to their public lectures. Subscribe to a newspaper online. Hang around the library and read some magazines for free. Find out what you like. All of this is possible because you have taken our advice and are not working in a bar thirty or forty hours a week; you have all that time to hear a lecture on the Rosetta Stone, listen to Naomi Klein, and read Scientific American.
• Get involved in intramural activities. Because you have followed our advice, you have time for them. Intramural sports (from the Latin “within the walls,” that is, not with other universities) exist in every conceivable form, from touch football to field hockey to fencing. Political organizations run from conservative to far-left progressive; if you want to shock your parents, you can join the Communists. Join a volunteer organization; become a Big Brother or Big Sister, and do this because it’s a good thing to do, not (just) because it will look good on your résumé. Just don’t do all these things at once; you don’t have that much time.
• Be smart about your social life. You’re going to have to cut us some slack here, because we are old guys talking to young people about romance and sex (not always the same thing, by any means), alcohol, and drugs. There’s a danger that anything we say on these subjects will sound hopelessly out of date or, even worse, creepy. Nonetheless, who you are as a sexual and social being — that is, establishing your sense of sexual identity, engaging in romantic relationships, choosing when and how much alcohol you consume, and deciding whether or not you will take recreational drugs — most often matures during your post-secondary years. There are two fundamental rules when it comes to sexuality and relationships: the first — especially in this time of HIV, AIDS, and various STDs — is “play it safe;” the second — which should be obvious and can apply to issues beyond human sexuality — is “be a decent person.” Sex, love, and possibly commitment are always in the air on university campuses. Be aware of this fact and make the most of it, always remembering the two rules. When it comes to alcohol and drugs, pragmatism needs to lead the way. As you know, alcohol poisoning is a very real thing, and illicit drug use is, beyond being illegal, simply a very good way to destroy both brain cells and academic records. The philosopher Democritus (Greek, 460–370 BCE) said that “immoderate desire is the mark of a child, not a man.” Good advice.
Grade Shock
We end this chapter with some news that might dismay you: studies have shown that the majority of first-year students at university get worse grades than they did in their last year of high school, sometimes much worse. A July 2010 study in Maclean’s published some alarming statistics: approximately 75 percent of students get lower grades than they got in high school. Of these, two-thirds go down one grade (the average drop is ten points from, say, A- to B-), and one-third drop by two letter grades (for example from A- to C-). Around 25 percent do about the same as in high school; and only a tiny minority, under 3 percent, see their grades improve.
The resulting shock can be great. Here you were an honours student in high school, and you are now just a B student or worse. How embarrassing, how worrying for your parents. Sometimes this affects your finances too, for some scholarships depend on keeping your grades up. The good news, though, is that in most cases this does not mean your intelligence has drained out of your ears during that last happy summer after high school graduation. It is simply a reflection of the absurd grade inflation that has poisoned the integrity of the Canadian high school system over the past forty years. Two generations ago there was a fair correlation between high school and university grades, but once the schools adopted a “student-centered” system of education, grades started to rise. If you doubt this, we will give you one statistic. Ontario awards the title “Ontario Scholar” to any high school graduate with an 80 percent average. When this began, in the late 1950s, fewer than 4 percent of graduates were Ontario Scholars, and they were awarded $400. Two years ago, almost half of graduates got 80 percent (and there’s no money anymore).
Universities have adjusted accordingly. In 1990, the average grade of students entering UBC was 70 percent; in 2000 it was 80 percent; and now it’s close to 90 percent — not because students are any smarter, or even because UBC has raised its standards, but because high school grades keep floating ever skywards. Some more elite programs, such as the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill, now require around 90 percent, not as an average, but as a floor for admission. This issue shouldn’t affect you except to serve as a warning that high school grades have no guaranteed relation to university grades. However, if you are capable and work conscientiously, you should do all right. Just don’t expect straight A grades with minimal effort.
So, be warned and be prepared. University is to high school as army boot camp is to summer camp at the lake. You will be treated like an adult from the outset, even though many first-ear students are not ready for the challenge. Close to 30 percent of all first-year students drop out or fail out. Welcome to a tough world.