YOU CAN GET A GREAT COLLEGE EDUCATION ALMOST ANYWHERE. And the same is true for a bad one. With a little research and planning, you can make the most of college while preserving your sanity and making progress toward your degree. Here’s how.
1. Diversify. College is one of the most varied worlds you are likely to inhabit. The rest of life, before and after college, tends to come presorted. Even a small college likes to admit students from as many backgrounds as possible and offer the widest possible range of courses and cocurricular activities. Treat college like a foreign country, an amusement park, or a museum. Indulge! Take chances! You may come up with your life’s passion (or partner) where you least expect it.
2. Mitigate risk while taking risks. Find out ways that your college supports experimentation. If your university offers pass/no pass courses, use those for your boldest choices. If you are an engineer, use that one precious elective (engineering schools are notoriously heavy on requirements) on a studio art class simply for the opportunity to spend a semester with creative students who solve problems with an entirely different set of assumptions and tools than you do. Conversely, if you are an artist, why not take a programming course? Learning how to learn requires being exposed to different ways of knowing and working with those with different skills and visions than your own.
3. Find a great prof and take advantage of all they offer. Great profs don’t just lecture well—they challenge you to think in new ways about new things. They don’t give answers; they ask deep questions. Visit their office hours, even if you are in a lecture class with four hundred other students (you would be surprised how few students do this). And if a favorite prof offers a quirky seminar, take it—even if it doesn’t fit your major and your requirements. It may be what nourishes you during a dreary term of required courses when you’re checking off too many boring boxes. (Note: This has a practical side, too. A professor who knows you well is far more likely to write you a good letter of recommendation.)
4. Shop around for the right adviser—and use them. Often. A great prof helps you to think boldly and ask new questions. A great adviser answers questions and helps you navigate bureaucracies and requirements that can undermine your success. (Rarely is a great prof also a great adviser. Each is an expert in a different realm.) Sometimes you get lucky and the adviser assigned to you is great—stick with them. Other times, you need to ask around, check out the campus Teaching and Learning Center, the dean of students, and the mentors or live-in faculty in the dorms. Ask other students who helped them the most, and see whether that person works for you. Or ask the departmental administrative assistant—often this person can steer you to the adviser who is magic at cutting red tape.
5. Start an evolving, personal résumé as soon as you get to college and use it as your personal guide on your life path. If you literally write out your life goals at the beginning of your college career, you can then update your résumé each semester, revisit your goals, and track the ways you are changing and growing. An evolving, personal résumé gives you a good baseline for seeing the variance between what you hoped to achieve and what you are doing. You can add in cocurricular events, internships, workshops, and other experiences that were meaningful to you and delete the ones that you felt wasted your time. You get to decide what does or does not belong on your personal résumé. Far better than filling in the requirements for a major, your evolving résumé helps you think about what you require to lead a good life—in college and beyond—and what you still need to do to get there.
6. Make your major minor. Look for a major in the field you think you might want to pursue as a career, but also look for one with the fewest requirements so, structurally, you can keep your options open, explore other fields and interests, and take all the electives you want in your major in the areas you want. Majors are designed by specialists in an academic field; they rarely map to what an actual job in the field requires (unless you are planning to be a college professor in that field). Even then, graduate schools like to see evidence of independent thinking, and so do employers. See whether your college offers a self-designed or topical major that crosses disciplinary boundaries. Most college students graduate without finding their life’s passion (80 percent, according to one recent survey). Expanding your options might help you find something you never considered before.
7. Form a study group. The best research on college success—whether at a top ten university or in a remedial class at a community college—indicates that being in a study group is the single most significant way to improve your performance, sustain your motivation, and keep you on track to success. As with an adviser, you may need to try out a few before you find the right group, but it makes every aspect of college easier and even offers a support network for after you graduate, too.
8. Know when to find a tutor. If you are required to take a course in an area where you feel shaky or face an important exam (LSAT, GRE, and so forth), be as efficient as possible. Many a student has dropped out of college because of one soulless requirement. Don’t let something cynical defeat you. Find a tutor or a testing service—don’t even think about it as an intellectual exercise. “Teaching to the test” is an intellectual waste. You won’t change that. So do it as quickly and painlessly as possible so that it doesn’t undermine all the exciting things you are doing elsewhere in college.
9. Learn beyond the classroom. Internships and classes with experiential components are ideal ways to see how the field you are studying translates into jobs in the real world. So many questions about careers never come up in a classroom. Do you like to work alone or in groups? Do you like to spend time at a screen (reading, writing, calculating, coding) or doing things (meetings, sales)? Do you like speaking in public? Do you prefer to work inside or outside in nature? Dressed up in business clothes or casual? Do you like people to be clear about what you need to do or would you rather blaze your own course? Do you like cities or want to live in a small town, in the United States or abroad? Do you like to travel or hate getting on planes? What level of material wealth makes you happy? How many hours a week do you want to work? What kind of social role do you like? Are you an activist or do you prefer to go by the rules, whoever makes them? These questions are rarely asked in school. They make a difference to your future success.
10. When it’s time to submit an actual, professional résumé, remember your first reader may be an algorithm. All of the exciting things you have learned and mastered and accomplished in college will impress your second reader—the human one. Getting past the machine that does the first sort can be tricky. Take advantage of the career center at your school to find out the best models for résumés and cover letters (two difficult genres to master). You can find out how to customize your résumé and job application to accurately reflect your skills while matching the exact key words in a job description. You can also find out how to balance that D in Calc with the prize you won at the city hackathon. The humans who have to wade through the résumés selected by algorithms will be just as impressed by strong interests and skills supplemented by bold experiences and curiosity as by grades. All the extras you gather in college add up to a picture of you as the inquisitive, fearless, and ambitious person you are. Congratulations! You are gaining an education that will serve you for life.