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Seven tips for making your first year of college a success

The first semester of college is just one new thing after another. It’s challenging, exciting, and sometimes a little scary. As a professor who’s taught hundreds of firstyear students, I'd like to offer seven tips to get your first year of college off to a good start.

4. Be proactive about asking for help

If you had an IEP (individualized education plan) in high school, or have applied for disabilities accommodations, make sure you understand the process for obtaining such accommodations in college. Professors can’t accommodate you without a letter advising them on your needs and they can’t ask you questions to help accommodate you unless you self-disclose. Be prepared for some faculty to be incredibly ignorant about learning disabilities. Figure out what you need and ask for it. 

There are three kinds of professors: those who say they never grant extensions (and mean it); those who say they don’t grant extensions (but will if you ask nicely and you haven’t been texting in class); and those who are total pushovers. Assume everyone is in category one, but if you really need more time, plan ahead, ask nicely, and have a good reason. Most of us are in category two.

Find your college or university’s writing center and use it. It’s like having a personal trainer for your papers. While we are on the subject of writing, don't plagiarize. We have Google. We’ll find you.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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