Getting What You Came For
If you’re like most students, you’ve made it to college with a few academic tricks up your sleeve. The cram session over a bowl of cereal before your first period French test; the cram session over a pizza slice before your fifth period chemistry test; the cram session walking between sixth period and seventh period mumbling the Gettysburg Address—they may have worked then (though even that is questionable), but they are unlikely to work now.
Most freshmen figure out too late that very few of those habits are suited to the unique and intensive challenges of collegiate course work. Then they either find themselves settling for mediocrity and hoping that future employers won’t ask about their undergraduate GPA (sorry, almost all employers check) or, even worse, they risk their reputation and college career by handing in work that isn’t theirs.
The good news is that a college admissions board tends only to admit students they believe are capable of making the grade. If you are smart enough to get into the college, you are smart enough to thrive there.
But what if the whole reason you performed well in high school (and thus got admitted to college in the first place) is because you did cheat? Don’t you need to cheat to keep up the performance? And since college is often so much larger, isn’t it true it’s less likely you’ll get caught? Well, no and yes.
No, you don’t need to cheat to get the grade you want. Regardless of what stunts you may have pulled for the last four years, you—and every other freshman—are starting over. You are all back at square one in terms of learning how to study, how to take effective notes, and how to learn (and it may be the last time in your college career that you get a fresh start, so take advantage of it).
Yes, it is true that the likelihood of getting caught is lower in college than it was in high school, but in that same breath let us add that the consequences are far, far greater. There is little to no grace if you are caught cheating—many schools have a “one-strike” policy, meaning a cheating conviction can get you expelled. Every job and grad school application will see that pockmark on your transcript from here until your teeth fall out. That’s no exaggeration. Learn to be master of (rather than be mastered by) your course load.
The most significant difference between college and high school is that you aren’t required to be here. So if school isn’t for you right now, you might talk with your parents about some creative ways to take time off. Seriously. College is an expensive proposition, and it will be here when you are ready. If this sounds in any way tempting given your situation, be sure to check out chapter 10, where we discuss taking a gap year in detail.
Assuming you decide to stay, one of the biggest differences in course work is that from the first day of class your college courses will be governed by a syllabus. With the exception of a few slacker profs (oh yes, they do exist), every professor will hand you a syllabus on the first day that maps out what you will read, discuss, and examine for the whole semester. Cool, no? Overwhelming too.
It can be daunting to see an entire semester’s worth of work listed on a few pages. On the upside, it will be rare that your weekend plans are soured (as probably happened more than once in high school) by a professor giving you a surprise massive assignment on Friday that is due Monday. In this scenario, if your weekend is ruined, it will most likely be because you failed to plan (and work) ahead.
Because of the syllabus, you will have more power than ever before to structure your academic life, as opposed to just reacting to it. We recommend the following strategy to help you get the best out of it: Start off by buying a month by month calendar (either paper or digital; the medium doesn’t matter) and fill in all the major reading and writing deadlines, as well as any labs or course meetings listed on your syllabus. Next, backtrack from each of those deadlines and figure how long it will take you to prepare for and complete them, and build a couple of your own milestones for each. For example, if you have a fifteen-page paper due halfway through the course, fill in a date by which you’ll have all of your research finished and another to have your annotated outline completed. If you really want to crush it, plan to have your paper finished a couple of days early.
Whoa! We know that sounds like nerddom and insanity talking, but if you have never experienced the “done early” high, you shouldn’t knock it. It’s a fabulous feeling to look at a beastly deadline and know that you were finished long before the midnight hour, especially when you see your colleagues slaving away at 2 a.m. in a state of panic while you head out for a Playstation tournament instead. Plus, in case something goes wrong—“Ack! It’s harder to write a fifteen-page paper than I thought and my laptop just died!”—you have a little breathing room.
The second huge difference between high school and college is that no one will be checking up on you (unless you commit some sort of heinous crime). Whatever support props you used in high school are gone now, and though assignments might be daily, they won’t be monitored on a daily basis, if at all. Profs rarely even check if you attend class unless you’re at a smaller school or in a smaller class, so you need to set up some sort of artificial monitoring to alert you if or when you’re falling behind. Practically that means that if you are expected to read a novel a week, it might help to create a reading schedule for a while until you’ve learned to align your reading pace with that of the college level.
It is also worth probing the professor’s expectations about readings listed on the syllabus. For many courses, especially in the social sciences and humanities, there may be some readings that are required and others that are only recommended. Few (if any) students do all of the recommended reading, but the very best students will do the recommended reading for particular weeks or topics that seem especially interesting. Supplemental readings are designed to reward the student whose curiosity has been piqued.
Every syllabus, no matter how vast, really just skims the surface of the topic. Some profs underscore this with a lengthy list of recommended readings to prevent students from getting smug thinking they have mastered the material prematurely. At some point nearly all of us have promised ourselves, “No pressure, I’ll just read the recommended readings this summer,” but we don’t believe we have ever met someone who actually did that. So if you think it’s worth the read, carve out the time now while the subject’s fresh in your mind. Beyond just passing a class, getting the best out of college means educating yourself well.
The third major difference between college life and high school will be that you are expected to analyze more. (This is largely why your rote memorization strategies from high school won’t work.) By and large, the expectation is that students begin to internalize and synthesize what they’re learning as opposed to just regurgitating facts. You will be expected to go deeper with the facts and to make meaning of them. A good way to test whether or not you are really analyzing the material as you learn it is to try to interact with what you’re reading—ask yourself questions at the end of each section to see if you were actually paying attention. The ultimate test after you finish reading is not only your comprehension of the material but your ability to communicate what you learned. If you don’t know it well enough to teach it to someone else, you don’t know it well enough.
Upper-level courses take analysis a step further in the direction of critique. Master’s students go even deeper and are expected to master, synthesize, and thoroughly critique whole subfields. PhD students dig down to bedrock by making original contributions to knowledge in the field. The very best profs at the very best schools in the very best courses will try to expose students to all of these levels—analyze, critique, contribute—and you should enroll in a class like that before you graduate (but rarely in your first semester).
In keeping with this, students will definitely be expected to analyze resources more. A quick Internet search will no longer be sufficient. See this as a great opportunity to develop a more astute grasp of the Web. Just as you wouldn’t use the “journals” by the grocery checkout as sources for a science paper (tempting as the two-headed pig story may be), you can’t use everything your search engine lands upon either. Real research involves reading a lot of sources and evaluating their credibility, seeking to understand whatever biases may lead a source to its point. Ultimately you will learn which sources can be trusted and which require some skepticism.
To help plow through the avalanche of hits you may discover on any given topic on the Web, it would be wise to talk with your TA or professor about respected sources in the field and start there as a point of comparison. The point is not to bad-mouth search engines, but rather to say that they are a very sophisticated instrument that most students mishandle. By itself, searching doesn’t lead to good analysis. Entire books could be written on how to weigh the value of sources, so we can’t delve into it here as much as we would like. If you assume that the sources listed on the syllabus or in books on the syllabus are reputable, then build your own web of sources from those references and you’ll be off to a good start.
Beyond that, see your college librarian. Reference librarians are the secret weapons of successful research, and far too few students use them. Some colleges have sought to remedy that oversight by offering workshops on navigating library databases and websites. So stop on by for a chat.
Making the most of your education has a lot to do with how well you manage your time. However, we are NOT suggesting you study all the time. In fact, it’s just the opposite. If you are studying smartly, you should be studying only a few hours each day, as opposed to feeling crushed by deadlines in the wee hours when your brain feels like porridge. For a resource chock-full of tips on how to study, check out Study Smart, Study Less written by our very own Anne Crossman; you may find it to be a significant time saver, not to mention grade booster. In the meantime, a few pointers on time management.
Establish a realistic yet “stretching” routine you can follow from week to week that maximizes small pockets of time in your schedule.
One possibility is to start your workweek on Sundays in order to lighten your load for the remainder of the week. Alternatively you could study during the typical workweek of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and have the weekends off. The most successful students take advantage of that hour here and there by reading, studying, meeting with a tutor or professor, or exercising to refresh their brain cells with a new supply of oxygen. Those measly one or two hours between classes can turn out to be a gold mine that adds up to a lot of free time later if you use them to get your work finished.
The best way to discover those valuable wedges of time is to map out your weekly schedule for the term with all the immovables in your calendar—class, labs, your work-study job, rugby practice, etc. From there, look at all the unused portions of time and be intentional with how you use them, scheduling breaks or study sessions where needed.
Something else to consider as you construct a study schedule is that most readings are paced with the lectures, and as a result will make the most sense if read on schedule. If possible, read the assigned material on the day of the lecture (or, most definitely, within a week of the lecture) so it is fresh in your mind—yet another reason not to schedule all your classes on the same day.
When I studied music in college, I was required to practice at least seven hours every week. It was a daunting task. Freshman year, I often dragged myself into the practice room dungeons at 10 p.m., trying in vain to get that German aria off of the pages and into my voice. One semester, though, I had forty minutes of downtime between my classes several days a week and started using that time to squeeze in a practice session. I was amazed at how it improved my abilities with the music, as well as freeing up my nights for socializing or other studies. Now I love it when there are gaps in my schedule; I make full use of them.
Rebecca—recent grad, Point Loma Nazarene U
Most important of all—and this one you shouldn’t ignore … please—don’t make your room your primary place to study. Go to the library or discover some special study location the rest of campus has overlooked (tip: it probably isn’t at the table near your friendly neighborhood barista), but don’t study in your room.
Despite your best intentions, your room is nothing but a small area packed with distractions and visitors who aren’t interested in watching you read. It may have worked at home, but this balance shifts now that you are living with your friends. You need to go somewhere else in order to focus, and it’s good to make that distinction early on.
Even though I had been advised repeatedly that my room was not a good place to study, I ignored these warnings my freshman year. One night, when I was writing one of my papers, I felt like I needed a break and before I knew it I had actually watched an entire season of The Office on Hulu. Realizing I had just wasted the past several hours, I packed up my stuff and moved to the library where I found a somewhat secluded table in the corner and cranked the paper out in less than two hours.
Lauren—sophomore, Northeastern U
So now that it’s your designated time for studying and you are in your designated space, how do you study? A basic tool we find to be highly valuable is the outline. It sounds bland, we know, but give it a chance.
The idea is to limit yourself to one sheet of paper and, after reading your material for class for the week, to construct some sort of outline or logic chart that concisely summarizes what you read.
Tempting as that extra ream sitting near your elbow may be, keeping it to a page will not only force you to test whether or not you understand the information well enough to simplify it, it will also provide you with a handy study guide. Believe us, it is much easier to review a single page than to go back through all of the handouts, class notes, and highlighted text in your textbook only hours before a final exam.
You can take this one step further and distill your weekly pages onto single index cards, and then at the end of the term summarize all of your weekly cards onto one or two pages. This may be some of the most intense analysis you will do all semester, but as a result it will make your exams that much easier (and, hopefully, successful).
The bottom line is that if you have studied the material properly throughout, there will be no need to cram at the end of the term. Even if the information doesn’t seem connected naturally, there is a connection of some sort since your prof saw fit to link it all together in one course. Sitting down to search out the course theme with the TA or professor during office hours partway through the semester (so you don’t have to fight the frantic crammers at the end of the term) may prove to be an invaluable exercise.
Most material can only be mastered over several weeks of sustained study, so start early and keep it up. Since most courses are cumulative, with later material building on earlier material, the better you learn the early stuff, the easier it will be to master the later stuff.
When it comes to getting the best out of your education, why go it alone when there are tutors, comrades, profs, and campus resources ready to come to your aid?
The most common mistake we have seen in this regard is with students who assume that only dummies need tutors. They wait too long to admit their confusion and when they finally do, the tutor sign-ups are full. There is a sort of stigma or humiliation that goes with needing a tutor, especially for those who are used to being the tutor. The best advice we can offer is this: get over it. Tutors are in high demand campus-wide and to get one, you need to sign up early. LOTS of people need and use tutors. In fact, most big league universities frequently run out of tutors because they are so popular, especially by the last three weeks of the semester. So should you find yourself needing a tutor, you can assuage your pride by reminding yourself you aren’t the only one.
Most schools provide at least some free tutoring for some students (such as athletes) or the equivalent of a generic help desk at a study center. Depending on the department, some tutoring may even be offered free to students within that major.
Check with the department’s main office to start your tutor search. Academic deans may know where to find them, as well as RAs—and just because these people haven’t heard of a tutor in your field doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.
In my chem class, when I didn’t quite understand the material, it snowballed until I got farther and farther behind because each new chapter built on the last. I let it get to a dangerous point where if I didn’t do something quickly, I was going to fail the class. So I finally got help from a tutor. Going over the material a couple of hours a day with someone else helped me understand it better, and I made enough headway to salvage my grade.
Brian—freshman, U of Oregon
If tutors aren’t your gig or you would like to get help beyond a tutoring service, study groups can be a great way to go. Depending on the subject, four or five people is often the ideal number. Dividing work among you can be an effective means of getting more accomplished, but be aware that input/output is a critical element of learning. That means you need to be handling all of the information yourself at some point in order for it to sink in.
Most people learn better with peers in an interactive setting because—let’s face it—it’s fun. Heck, most anything is fun in a group. And it’s been proven time and time again that the best way to learn a topic is to try to teach it to someone else because you reinforce what you already know and quickly figure out what you don’t. It is a paradox: study groups can be a good place to learn if you go there prepared to teach other people.
Where a study group tends to go wrong is when its members rely on it too heavily, such as a student attending her group expecting to take more than give. The most effective groups are those that require some sort of advance preparation from each of the members so that coming together is an opportunity to resolve, clarify, or synthesize what each has found. The group can also be effective for brainstorming questions that may be on the test or drilling each other on certain concepts.
Of course, sometimes groups can be less than helpful, being more pooled ignorance than shared wisdom. Most students get in trouble with their study groups by not spotting difficulties early on. One solution is to arrange meetings from week to week (as opposed to promising to meet for the entire semester) so that there is more freedom to change or leave the group as needed. Just remind yourself that the study group isn’t some twisted popularity contest and that everyone needs to pull their own load if they want to stay—which includes you as well as the guy everyone thinks is hilarious but always has a convenient excuse for not doing his fair share.
I had a study group for all my math classes and believe me when I say that it’s a lot easier to understand a peer than a professor or TA since they are more likely to be on the same intellectual level as you. However, a couple of my study groups have gone awry and ended up as time-wasting avenues since all members of the group were really good friends and we ended up talking rather than getting work done.
Onome—junior, Stanford U
Let’s not forget the profs. While we covered the topic of getting help from them extensively in chapter 6, there is one final point we can add here. If you are lost, before seeking out a tutor or even your study group, the first person you should consider speaking with is your professor. A simple visit during office hours to say, “I don’t get this” and a few minutes of help will illuminate whether your problem will be easy to solve or if a tutor will be necessary.
Our final tip is to ask campus resources for training on time management and study skills—it may be that there is an afternoon course or weekly session you could join “free” (aka, part of your tuition). Your best bet is to seek out an academic resource center or counseling center.
Libraries are also rich resources—the reference libraries especially. Most staff are knowledgeable and eager to help (particularly for research papers or projects) and are not well utilized. It isn’t against the rules to ask a librarian for help searching out sources or recommending materials, and she may be more helpful if you visit during nonpeak library hours and before closing time.
Some campuses also offer writing studios where peers or instructors can help you with writing a specific paper or even writing in general, while others may have an alumni “expert” program through which alums can advise you on specific research topics.
Every college offers a host of resources to help you learn better. It may require some perseverance to sort through the offerings to find the one that best suits your needs, but you’ll be glad you did.
Everything we described in the previous section is legitimate help. But we don’t have to tell you that there is equally illegitimate help out there. “I regret to say that we have seen more plagiarism in recent years than we ever wanted to imagine,” said an ethics board member at a prominent university. “Without question, there are two causes of plagiarism that dominate. The first is the act of desperation. This is the student who waited until the last minute to write her paper or lab and now has to throw something together. It’s 2 a.m. and the class meets in six hours—she simply panics. She cuts and pastes from the Internet and it’s destined for doom.
“The second type is the truly ignorant act. This is where a student doesn’t fully understand what the college expects in terms of citations when writing a research paper. In many schools, improper citations equal plagiarism. The intent is irrelevant! The student who commits plagiarism out of ignorance is as guilty as the one pasting from the Internet. This second student probably has limited experience in writing a research paper and really doesn’t know what is expected, but it still appears as though he is trying to get away with something. Ignorance is no excuse.
“Both students then face not only a failing grade but also major sanctioning or a period of separation from the school. Tuition is not refunded for the time of their absences (depending on the school and the situation). The good news is that if a student doesn’t know how to cite a paper, most schools offer writing clinics they can take in advance. They can ask their professor for information on citing as well, but few students do this because they are either afraid of appearing stupid or they are just lazy; then they wait until the end and don’t have the time they need and we’re back at the beginning with student number one.” Thus says the expert.
Let’s face it, most students don’t bother to read their university’s guidelines on plagiarism—seriously, it feels a lot like reading the manual to your parents’ dishwasher—but you should. Those same students who didn’t set out to plagiarize but did (more out of ignorance than deviousness) were found responsible because they erred on the side of inadequate sources. Enough students have failed to read their school’s definition of plagiarism that a growing number of universities are now posting it as required reading before students can register for courses. Take it from the ethics board member mentioned earlier: “It is much better to have a prof say to you that you footnoted too many times rather than not enough. The first is annoying; the second is a major violation that could get you thrown out of school.”
Most cases of cheating begin with the research paper, when a professor reviews the bibliography and finds the sources to be either inadequate or imaginary. It should be obvious that every source you use must be genuine. Beyond documentation, where most students inadvertently trip up is in researching information on the Web and then cutting and pasting more than they should.
Like we mentioned earlier, the best investment you can make in covering your hide is spending the time to develop a paper trail. Mistakes happen, and you never know when you’ll need some backup. A friend of ours—Bob—was accused of cheating in organic chemistry when he had only been following the instructions of the TA. The problem came when the course rotated TAs a couple of times. By the time they got to the third TA for the course, she thought he was academically out of line and sent him to the ethics committee to be reviewed. Fortunately for Bob, he had a paper trail of notes from the original TA advising him how to proceed with his course work, so his name was cleared. Phew. That was a close one.
While you won’t want to seem like an insensitive conspiracy theorist assuming every course assistant is out to get you (meaning, don’t send an email after every conversation saying, “You said this and then I said that”), you will want to highlight the critical conversations and follow up with appropriate emails. Possible ways to follow up would be to say, “Thanks for your time after class yesterday. Just to review, so I’m sure I understood your instructions, you suggested I review this and then talk to so-and-so and then use his suggestions as one of my sources,” or whatever the conversation may have been, so it sounds like you are being grateful rather than preparing for a witch hunt.
Some profs make past tests available, and even though it seems like cheating to read them, it isn’t. In law school, some profs encourage their students to go to the reserves in the library and use old tests to study. The prof may not ask the exact questions, but the format will be similar. Just knowing how the test will be structured can be comforting. The bottom line is that it’s always best to ask—if the prof doesn’t mention his policy on consulting previous tests, be sure to ask permission. Don’t rely on explicit instructions and then look for a loophole. The student conduct defense process can be painful, so permission and a paper trail are critical.
BUSYNESS IS NOT A VIRTUE
Going Easy on the Extracurriculars
Most freshmen study well for the first few weeks but distractions frequently take over and—when they float by on the lack of immediate penalties—they fall behind. The first week is not wasted, but the first month often is; and, no matter how extreme your efforts to salvage the semester, you cannot make up in December what should have been done in September.
For the first two to four weeks (or longer!), it’s possible that you won’t have any assignments due, particularly if you’re not taking any math or science courses. As a result, a couple of things tend to happen: as a freshman, you enjoy doing zero work and build an unrealistic mind-set about college life, or you begin to fill your time with other activities.
Some students go crazy on that second one. Because they were involved in a zillion clubs in high school or did dozens of hours of community service each week, they continue in that habit. Then, once the semester gets rolling, they find themselves either having missed the boat in what they were supposed to have learned in class or terribly overcommitted.
The key here is to get involved early on but not at the expense of your course work. Take your current free time as a very brief gift, and enjoy it as such.
The coaches of well-respected collegiate sports teams tell their players that it is better to take a lower grade—even an F—than to plagiarize. The risks just aren’t worth it. Professors are darn smart, and there are a number of clues that tip them off to a paper being a fake. (We’d love to list those here, but we might have to go into hiding as a result.) It may not seem like they catch many students, but figure that every student taking a course is writing in her professor’s area of expertise, so he will be able to sniff out inaccuracies or misappropriations faster than she realizes because he will be incredibly familiar with the material. Profs didn’t get their degrees—or their posts—for naught. Some of them know their field so well they can even tell you in which chapter of what book a “borrowed” quote was published. Borrower, beware.
Even if your professor isn’t as savvy as some, many universities now have various forms of software that detect cheating. All a prof needs to do is have his assistant send the stack of papers through a scanner and an hour later—voilà!—a printout of any papers that appear on the Internet.
If you can’t get the paper done and need more time, ask for an extension. If you don’t get it, take your lumps. But don’t cheat—it’s a quick ticket out of school for a while, if not permanently. Some schools show on transcripts an X rather than an F to indicate when a student has been suspended or failed a course due to discipline. And that means your future employer will have some hefty questions should he even be willing to consider you for an interview.
To future employers and graduate schools, flunking is an immaturity that one can grow out of—or, at worst, a skill limitation. Cheating is a sign of something far more serious that may make you too risky to hire.
Ninety-nine percent of the time there is no reason to cram.
If learning is managed properly, students should not find themselves needing to cram and pull all-nighters—which is why we devoted so much time at the beginning of this chapter to setting up structures for studying properly. Occasionally there are exceptions—where the prof will throw something in that you didn’t realize you needed to know or a minor emergency arises and your carefully crafted schedule doesn’t work as planned: accidents happen. But for the most part, if you establish priorities and stick to a schedule, there is no need to cram.
An hour spent reviewing organized notes is worth four hours of looking at information for the first time and trying to shrink-wrap it into your long-term memory. We would even add that an hour of studying in the first month of the semester is worth two in the second, three in the third, and so on because you are laying a foundation in a very time-sensitive manner.
Certainly there will be times when you need to focus only on an upcoming exam and it looks like cramming. But what it will really be is just focused review. A tiny fraction of students can successfully cram in college, to be sure. Yao is a friend who would skip a third of his classes, reserve all of his reading for the last week of the semester, then lock himself in his room and read nonstop. And more often than he deserved, he was able to make that strategy work. But many who tried to follow his example failed miserably. What they didn’t realize was that Yao was gifted with a certain and very unusual genius that enabled him to store large quantities of information quickly and temporarily—it’s rare, and we recommend that you don’t risk trying to do what he did.
There are certainly times in real life when cramming becomes necessary, especially in the business world with project deadlines. Prior to the deadline, team members do all that is required, which may mean getting very little sleep. The ability to perform at a high level on little sleep is a valued skill exercised in countless careers to be sure, but it is an emergency plan and not a daily habit. Companies are far more interested in you having good time management skills so as to avoid unnecessary emergencies, and as a bonus quality, having the ability to fly into emergency mode if necessary.
Should you find yourself in desperate straits with an impending deadline, here are a few tips (what kind of help would we be if we didn’t at least throw you a rope?):
Look for course themes. Start with the syllabus and look at the texts that have been assigned with a view of the course as a whole. Is there some sort of theme or big-picture argument the prof is trying to get you to understand? What is the perspective of each assigned reading and how do they differ? Your familiarity with the thematic structure of the course will be helpful should you need to write any essays on the exam, and your ability to cite some of the assigned readings will go a long way—even if you haven’t read them in their entirety.
Recharge your brain. Consider taking power naps to help recharge yourself. A twenty-minute nap can go a long way in helping you push yourself an hour or two longer. You may want to experiment first to see if this strategy works before depending on it at crunch time.
Reorganize the workload. Break an unmanageable amount of work into chunks to make it more manageable—it’s hard to memorize a chart of diagrams when your adrenaline is pumping and your brain is in fight-or-flight mode because you’re super stressed. Break the job down, saying, “I’ll work on this half of the page for the first hour, the second half of the page for the second hour.” When the project is manageable, it has a calming effect which enables you to focus.
Refuel your body. Eat snacks—the healthier and more nourishing, the better. Think protein. Think carbs. Your brain needs all the help it can get, so go for nuts and cheese and fruit and skip the jelly beans. Refined sugar may give you a temporary high, but if you are pushing yourself without sleep you may crash to an unrecoverable low.
Avoid artificial highs. The latest craze is to borrow prescription medications, especially attention-related meds, to get that extra edge to focus. These drugs often allow students to work through the night, and some perform fine, so students see them as an effective way to get their work done. Of course, whatever works becomes a habit and popping an occasional pill “for emergencies” eventually becomes more routine. There are huge long-term implications for this sort of drug abuse that are dangerous and, frankly, frightening. Rather than abusing drugs in college, use the time to develop healthy lifelong habits that don’t rely on artificial means to get the job done.
Get some fresh air. Take a hike. Really. If you’ve got a lot of work to do, next to a nap and a snack, a quick stroll around the building can do a lot of good—especially if it’s cold outside. But even if it’s late summer and positively sweltering, getting out of your chair and allowing the blood to circulate a little faster will have your synapses cheering. A quick fifteen or twenty minutes of cardio should do the trick.
Make time for creative study breaks. Knit a beanie. Practice karaoke. Paint your toenails. Essentially find some other means to relax if you find yourself anxious and sweating through your shirt. The more relaxed you are, the more successful you will be in transferring short-term knowledge into long-term memory. Plus, your feet will look pretty.
Take it easy. Don’t expect much of yourself the day after (and for some people, two days after) a major cram session. Meaning, don’t schedule two all-nighters back to back. The body needs a fair bit of time to recover, so be nice to yourself.
Learning how to manage my course work was, for me, the most helpful part of this book. When I mapped out my schedule for second semester, I arranged a set number of study hours into my weekly schedule for each class. Two good things came out of this: I was done with my work way ahead of time and, if I had time left over, I was able to put extra work into classes I really enjoyed (which, in my case, was drawing).
Philip—freshman, Virginia Commonwealth U