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Having at least a few hours of sleep between all that shit you studied and your test will get better results than pulling an all nighter to study like 4 more hours. First of all, your brain sucks balls at information storage and retrieval when you're exhausted. And second of all, sleep is when your brain organizes all the new info you picked up, so you will actually remember more of what you studied after you've slept.
This might be rudimentary for some folks, but anyone like me: meet with counselors regularly to make sure you’re on-track for graduation!
I was my own counselor. I used the course catalogs to determine what courses I needed to take to graduate. I thought I was doing well til I found (during what I assumed was my last semester) that I needed additional math credits and anothet credit in some other weird category to graduate. I took summer courses of Pre-Calc and Bowling to graduate a semester later than expected.
Do what it takes to pass your classes in university, but prioritize finding an internship or entry level job for your career. No one cares about your GPA, but all entry level jobs want experience.
To avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of graduating and never getting a job because they want experience, and you can’t get the experience unless they give you a job, get an entry level job in college and try to get extra responsibilities in that job for your resume.
Don’t sleep on your university’s career services office.
Do the reading, homework, and assignments as soon as you can, and sleep well.
Buy a vehicle that looks like the campus maintenance vehicles and get easy parking around campus.
Go to office hours and ask thoughtful questions, you can network with both students, staff, instructors, and TAs, everyone is your network.
In some universities its cheaper to not buy a parking pass, and just pay the tickets (assuming its infrequent enough).
Join study groups, and when others ask questions, explain the answers as best you can in your own words.
This was key in study retention.
Don’t buy the textbooks. You probably don’t need them. If you do, buy a used one from another student for 1/100th of the price or get an online copy.
Also your mileage will vary depending on the book/edition, but a lot of times a “new edition” of a textbook is just a transparent cash grab by the publisher and is 99% the same material with different page numbers, so it’s worth asking the prof/a TA if the previous edition is pretty much the same. You can generally get “outdated” editions of a textbook for startlingly little money. Like I’m talking sub-$5 for a book that’s $140 new sometimes.
When I was a TA for a gigantic intro class they’d just released a new edition of the book we used but they’d only sent us two desk copies (publishers send free copies to professors who teach out of their textbooks), and the class was run by a professor and three TAs, so the TAs all had to share one copy of the new edition and taught out of the old edition 90% of the time. They’d only changed one chapter, so the professor scanned that one chapter to PDF and we handed it out to anyone with the old edition.
We also had, for some reason, like five boxes of the old edition under a desk in the department office and gave them out to anyone who would take them. You can hardly give old editions of textbooks away.
For high school: your body will really want to go to sleep at 2 am every morning, but don’t. Go to bed at a regular time. You might not like it at night, but in the morning your body will love you.
For college: Don’t cheat. It might be super tempting, but if you’re caught even once, the consequences are so much worse than in high school. Plus you’re setting yourself up for failure in the future. Do you really wanna be the guy who cheated their way through college only to end up with functionally zero experience in a real-world scenario where you have to apply what the job thought you learned? Hell, most jobs will probably see right through you and deny you on the spot.
Also whatever your brilliant-ass cheating scheme is, your TA has probably seen it 27 times already.
Also that thing where you go mess up the headers in an empty or irrelevant file and pretend your homework got corrupted to buy yourself an extra day was invented pretty much at the same time as electronic homework submission.
Not ethical: If you have to submit assignments (like
.docxfiles) online and you haven’t finished it in time, take a random.docxfile and edit it in a text editor (like notepad) and add/delete some random stuff. You can send this file and the professor won’t be able to open it so you will get an extension by default.Just ask for an extension. Professors have seen this “trick” a thousand times and know exactly what you’re doing. They will respect you more and give you more leeway in the future if you’re straight with them.
Ah cool. I never had to use this myself but I always found it kind of cool. I guess it’s good I never had to use this lol.
Create a schedule and adhere to it.
Make friends, join clubs, and have fun.
Attend your lectures. I found that even if I was doing work for another class or playing on my iPad, I still gained something from attending lectures.
Go to office hours and build a relationship with your professors.
Create a four year plan of all of your classes. Your advisor may not be a good one and can fuck you over.
Take some summer classes at your local community college (check to make sure they transfer over).
Don’t overly stress yourself out with grades. C’s get degrees (unless you’re trying to go to grad school or professional school, then you’re going to have to try harder than a C)
Advisors are generally shit. My degree had classes that were spring/summer only, fortunately I had friends to tell me, the advisors don’t say shit.
Someone I know almost didn’t graduate this semester because his advisor gave him all of his easy classes in the fall semester and made him take 18 credits of hard engineering classes this spring. My advisor didn’t allow me to request a time override despite them only having a conflict of one hour on one day. I need both of those classes to graduate and I couldn’t take the other section because it was during the same time of my other major class. Luckily, it was a blessing in disguise and I was able to take that class this summer at a community college which was way easier than taking it at my home institution
That reminds me of another important tip. 12 credits isn’t full time unless you want to take 5+ years. You need 15/16 credits per semester average to actually graduate in 4 years.
