Skip to footer

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 tell you that if that’s your experience, this means you’re doing it right. If you’re treating your work seriously, taking intellectual risks, and asking questions, from time-to-time you’ll be both exhilarated and confused.

I call this learning – whether you want to be a mechanical engineer or a physical therapist, a photojournalist or a concert trombonist. Whatever your dreams and ambitions, here are seven tips to get your first year of college off to a good start.

1. Put schoolwork first

Kyle Mills/Lewiston Tribune/AP
Ray Lauer and his youngest daughter Katie recieve a helping hand from Lewis-Clark State College Orientation Assistant Caytlin Wickard (center) as they tote daughter Maria Lauer's belongings into her dorm room in Clearwater Hall in downtown Lewiston, Idaho, Aug. 22.

The reason you are at school is to get the best education you can to be the best person possible. Fun is important, and you will make friends of a lifetime, but put your schoolwork and studies first. 

Do the reading. I recommend “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. It is ancient – from the 1940s, back when people read books – so they know what they’re talking about.

Talk in class. You’ll be amazed at how much you learn by putting your ideas into words. In big classes, this helps teaching assistants and professors distinguish you from a sea of faces. In small classes, it helps create an intellectual community with your peers.

Get organized. Don't let a deadline sneak up on you because you didn’t read the syllabus. Have a plan for transferring all your deadlines from course syllabi onto a calendar for the whole semester.

Andrea L. Volpe has taught undergraduates at Colby College, Rutgers University, Tufts University, Harvard University, and Boston University for more than 15 years, six of them teaching first-year students exclusively. 

1 of 7
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.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.