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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).
I can't say I know anything about the parking/car stuff as that sounds very US-specific, but I can second everything else.
Don't get complacent with the work, stay on top of it, and if you ever feel yourself falling behind, don't be scared to ask for help. Literally everyone wants to see you succeed, but the further you fall behind the harder it gets.
At the same time, allow yourself to have some fun too.
Do the reading, homework, and assignments as soon as you can
100*this. It can look tedious and you might not really see the point of what they want you to do but...
Even Uni is just a school. You have to jump through the hoops. You will be far more relaxed if you do that than if you do everything last minute and then fail some assignments due to turning it in late. Pluspoint being, if other students get to know you to get things done, they will want to work with you in group assignments.
It's soo much working with the system than fighting it.
Even Uni is just a school. You have to jump through the hoops. You will be far more relaxed if you do that than if you do everything last minute and then fail some assignments due to turning it in late. Pluspoint being, if other students get to know you to get things done, they will want to work with you in group assignments. It's soo much working with the system than fighting it.
Also, nobody is forcing you to be there. You're there for you, so don't be a dingus and waste that opportunity.
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.
The best advice.
No one told me how important internships were. I still got a job but I definitely was behind my peers. A lot of them left for top companies. My first job wasn't nearly as good and it took me several years to start making the same pay they were.
If a bartender asks for an ID and you're under age, dont give them shit, just them doing their job. Along the same lines, RAs arent doing their shit for fun most of the time. Ignoring check-in rules are fine, ignoring week day quiet hours is not.
Living on campus can cost more but you are more likely to go to school events when its a quick walk versus driving. On the other hand, its easier to party a bit too hard when its always around you.
Walk through every hall at least once. Maybe you never take a class in that one, but you might miss out on seeing a nice mural or some flyer.
Getting involved in clubs can help make you friends, I was in college band and other than the hard work, it paid plus made a ton of friends along the way
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.
Never buy books until after the first class, except maybe math textbooks.
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.
Been out of college for years now, but pick a quality backpack. Sounds weird, but between work and school and whatever else, sometimes it feels like you live out of that thing. Maybe that was just me
Yup. I bought a Peak Design backpack. Cost me something like 230 bucks but it's such good quality and a well-thought out product. Still use it daily now, about 10 years later and as good as the day I bought it.
In every class, try to score as high as possible on the first assignment/exam. Since less material is covered at that point, less effort is required per unit of results.
Then later in the semester, you're free to put your effort where it's most needed, instead of needing to scramble across all your classes because you need good results on the final assignments just to pass.
Also, in subjects with group work, it lets you survive a bad group, rather than failing your course because you get stuck with some maladjusted dingus. Moreover, you can use your high grades on the first assignment to leverage your way into a good group. This kind of group-work metagaming is especially important in engineering subjects, and doubly so again if the course is bell-curved.
Finally, try to do one creative thing per year and put it in a public forum, especially on a platform you control (e.g. a blog). Even small things are OK. Literally having any body of work outside of class assignments will let you crush 90% of your peers when applying to grad school, a job, a scholarship, or really just about anything with a halfway sane selection process. It's also fun (doing creative things, not crushing your peers).
Not really a "hack," but literally just prioritize the things you care about.
I feel like there's so much pressure when you're young to be excelling in literally every field. You're expected to be getting great grades while also having the time of your life at parties while also doing extracurriculars, and so on.
If you only care about resume building, just focus on grades (and extracurriculars if you're in high school). It's okay to not have friends and get terrible sleep, school is only temporary anyways!
If you only care about appreciating life, that's valid too! Functionally there's often no difference between a 70% and a 100% as long as you make "the cut" to get into college/a job/whatever.
Objectively, the only thing you should not be neglecting is your health. To be perfectly honest, sometimes you will just need to pull all-nighters to get your priorities done. Don't make a habit of it.
Also, one last controversial opinion: Office hours are useless if you already know the material, you shouldn't just be attending office hours by default.
C's get degrees.
I don't agree with the no friends part, uni/college is one of the very few places in your life that it will be (relatively) easy as fuck to make good friends, partners and acquaintances.
You're depriving yourself of an amazing experience if you just burn through it like someone's after you and only care about grades.
I agree. College is really the first time in a school setting where the people you see on a daily basis are there because they share the same interests as you. You have the opportunity to make friends based on that, instead of the fact that you happen to live in the same postal code as them. This means you have the chance to hit it off with people from all walks of life because you all have one interest in common already. And those friendships can last your entire life and even possibly land you a job because you work in the same field.
Highschool money making hack: Take note of the vending machines and what they sell. Figure out what they don't have that people want, then buy it in bulk at the store to sell at school for profit.
At my school they didn't allow soda in the vending machines, so I made bank selling cans of Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew out of my locker for $1-2 each. I remember earning enough to buy an iPod and that was pretty much all I was doing it for.
Had a classmate doing the same thing, except the admin got word and threatened him with suspension if he kept selling soda.
Dang that's lame. Once I had a teacher ask me for one and I was gonna give it to him for free, but he insisted on paying the $1 since he was just a cool dude.
Academically, make sure to start off each semester well. It's much less stressful to have some As and Bs at the beginning in case something comes up or you bomb a test, rather than starting with an F and attempting to climb out of it.
Socially, be fun and get to know people but don't be a drunk asshole. Your peers may interview you for a job one day and it would be bad if they remembered you as a drunk asshole.
Financially, start off in community College. You can still find some that are only $1-2K for tuition and books per semester. It's so much cheaper than starting at a 4 year university. Also check the pricing for living somewhere near the campus vs the dorms. At my university, the dorms were about 2.5 times more expensive than living with a roommate 5-10 minutes away.
Explore a bunch of different paths by taking different electives. Also don't put all your elective classes in the first 2 years, life will be much easier in your last year of college if you only have a couple high level classes and a PE class or an elective class that you can enjoy and relax with. Finally, don't be afraid to change your major.
Go to the cheapest college you can based on out of pocket costs. University names aren't actually that valuable outside the top 3-5 per field. The difference between 7 and 97 isn't that much. It's also generally better to be in the top of a lesser school than bottom of a good school, consider a transfer if you find yourself in the bottom quarter of students.
Nobody cares what your rank in your school is. There's no need to transfer if you're at the bottom.
It affects things still. Professors aren't recommending the kid struggling to pass or even failing the class. The best internship opportunities are generally reserved for better students. You aren't getting any help from a college network when you are clearly struggling. A poor GPA isn't going to prescreen you out of a process most the time, but it will be used against you in multiple candidate scenarios.
I don't know if this is actually good advice. I've worked for a company that only recruited out of a few schools in the state (Colorado) and didn't pursue applicants from community colleges and places like University of Phoenix.
So my personal experience says that while you might not wanna break the bank going to an Ivy League school, it still helps to go to something like a state school.
Yes some companies gatekeep based on college, but A there aren't many of them, and B they often only do that for fresh grads. It's not worth worrying about those places when they will happily hire you in 3-5 years anyway, and you likely are going to leave again in another 3-5 years.
University of Phoenix is a step up from ITT tech level scams. It's not really the same league as as the 13/15 state universities you haven't heard of in my state (Michigan), and probably 10 or so of the private schools.
You also generally can't get a bachelor's degree at a community college, so they really aren't at the same level either. They aren't a bad option to start with though.
Don't sleep on your university's career services office.
Or if youre first gen/low income TRIO can be a great help
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.
Right, also be mindful with changing majors as it can mean there's new requirements. Had to go take another foreign language two years after taking my original major's amount. Was not the most fun trying to pick it back up
I switched majors and had to take a whole extra year because of when final level classes were offered.
Holy shit. Me, too. Yes, nothing quite so sad as Bowling For Diplomas.
Lol no kidding. Glad we made it out the other side! I'm assuming you're from the US as well?
Aside from the initial class meeting, my bowling credit was largely "independent study", meaning I just had to log 9 games a week at the school's rec center bowling alley.
I mistakenly did the math one day. I don't remember the figures (thank goodness) but I'd have saved a lot more money than I thought (for a cheaper state school) just....bowling 9 games a week at the local bowling alley.
But where's the prestige of a college credit approved by my professor, a fella that I think played Lollipop Chainsaw on the Xbox + "Party in the USA" over the PA every day I went in that summer? Lol
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.
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.
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.
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 really a hack but I love using loose leaf paper with triangle holes that's reinforced with tape. It's called "College Ruled Reinforced Paper". My papers don't constantly rip out anymore.
Also I like refillable notebooks. They're regular notebooks you can refill and much lighter and easier to carry.
Was talking to my friend about this the other day in the context of trade school but I think it applies here: you can change careers whenever you want. When we were younger it felt like such a big decision to pick a trade or in this case a major because it seemed like you were locking in for life, but you can just like... go do something else. No one cares. Someone wanted to hire me as an engineer the other day and I struggled to graduate high-school. Education is kind of a shotgun approach. You get a really broad understanding of a lot of thing because your actual job will probably only use a fraction of it and they're trying to prepare you to not be completely lost wherever you end up.
Also old teachers are really lazy and the test is probabaly pretty similar, if not identical, to the one they gave last year. Good to know people a little older or save things for your younger siblings.
Office hours are way cooler than you think, if you like the prof. Take advantage of them.