College Advice I Wish I’d Taken
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1. Show up to office hours. Even if you sit there and do nothing, TA's notice -- and TAs will absolutely spill the beans on what to prep for for exams, even unintentionally.
2. If you're so brainfried that you can't study any more, go to the gym. Not only is exercise generally good, I'm real convinced it's good for memory consolidation too.
3. If you're attending an expensive private university, networking is effectively what you're buying. Exploit ruthlessly.
This is how I got into my job. It's never too late. Bring yourself out and talk to people.
my first graduate school advisor took me on as a full staff member 5 years out of undergrad. It turns out he knew exactly who i was and was keeping tabs on me in industry, waiting for me to reenter the market. I don't know what I did to deserve that, but I'm eternally grateful.
Even if it's not an expensive school, email / talk to all your professors, classmates, lab partners, etc. I didn't start doing that until my 3rd year.
For me it was: My mentor's friend -> internship -> first job
Just showing up and hanging out in the TA's office when you don't have any question seems kind of weird to me.
I read a study a while back that showed taking breaks after learning/studying is crucial to efficient memory consolidation. Breaks can be filled with other activities, like working out. Promoting general blood flow, prob doesn't hurt in getting fresh O2 to the brain while it's doing it's thing....
Good advice doesn't just tell you what you will be glad you did later, it directly addresses the real problems that you have now. It's not easy to give because it requires that you step into someone else's shoes. The last one suggesting seeking out emotional support is probably the closest to this, but it's also some of the most common pieces of advice published anywhere.
And yet I don’t know what I would actually suggest people consider. Health care does have good, local growth prospects at least. But that’s very much not for everyone, myself included. It just seems like more than ever that outside of very few localities work and the “American dream” are way off from the realm of possibilities.
The "job" of the more mature person is to tell you that you're focusing on insignificant shit right now and that this is a problem. And to also tell you what are more significant issues you should be focusing on. How do you solve your problem however is entirely up to you.
They're not there to hand-hold you, they are there to give you perspective.
Still, if you wish to elaborate, I'll gladly give you my opinion about your current problem -- if your comment included yourself, I mean.
Get all your reading done before class. Class is review.
If you have a paper due get a draft done a week ahead of time. Then you can hammer on it over the week.
Shop for TAs the first week. In a big lecture class, your TA will make the class.
Avoid bad teachers. I never didn't get into a class. But I dropped three classes the first week because I thought the lecturer was weak. There was something else better to take. I missed a class that was only taught once a year but the prof sucked. Nothing is worth that. There is another way, always.
If you're in STEM you'll have to take some LA classes for breadth. Make these count. These aren't classes you have to take. These are classes you get to take.
Hit the gym. A lot.
I regretted I didn't. I consistently find myself unable to have any meaningful conversations with anyone on anything outside of Computer Science (even then I am only comfortable discussing security and infrastructure; ask me about compiler I can tell you the basics and that's about it). Good teachers teaching LA can prepare you becoming more full-stack in life :) Good LA classes are usually more discussion-oriented (but I REALLY HATE WRITING PAPERS).
The key is getting a draft out, literally a raw simple draft of what you're gonna say, a week ahead of time. It's kind've like pseudo code. Then fill that in.
Then I'd hammer on my papers over the week. They'd start out raw and get better and better. I'd tweak. I'd find a better word. (Is this sounding familiar?) I'd work on it.
When I turned it in, I knew I was getting an A. I had two papers quoted in lecture. Hey wait, I wrote that! I don't think I ever got less than a B+, generally A's.
Writing isn't magic. It's work. In fact, what 'they' do isn't really that much different from what 'we' do.
Why not read a few books and watch a few documentaries and start chiming in?
But, anyway, it's never too late to start reading literature or history or whatever else really. I think I've read more stuff in the past few years than I ever did in school.
For those who disagree with the above advice, there are a couple of options that will make the obligatory humanities requirements beneficial to your professional career:
1) Technical writing courses, if available, or any course that requires you to analyze text and write essays that require logical structure and argumentation (which covers a lot of options). A key aspect of success in any technical field is the ability to quickly and clearly communicate ideas to others in writing.
2) Foreign language courses. Getting a bit of fluency in a foreign language that interests you can bring surprising opportunities.
Networking.
I didn't fail linear algebra because a friend explained one important concept to me twenty minutes before the exam.
I got my first(not related to my education) job because I helped a friend with calculus(his father was a manager in a company and hired me shortly after his son passed his exams).
I got my first paid internship because I bumped into my friend while I was visiting some other friends in their dorm(apparently the said friend's manager was looking to spend his budget - or so it seemed given that the hiring process was a formality really).
I got my first "real" job because a friend of mine ran a company and was in need of devs.
I could go on and on. Basically connections were the thing that jump-started my career.
So my advice would be: try to be likable and hang out with people with grit.
> try to be likable
You can't do that. But showing genuine interest in what people think and do, being a listener and not only a talker, is what gets many people to like you. And that's not something that's easy to fake. You have to be genuinely curious about other people's perspective and context.
Anyway I originally went entirely against your advice here and it worked for me. Mostly because my fellow computer science students hated initiating smalltalk and enjoyed a good story, so lifting this burden off them was good.
I guess what it shows is that neither of our approaches are guaranteed to work.
Also, small talk and a good story aren't mutually exclusive. ;)
In a field like computer science, time is better spent working on personal projects, hashing out ideas with peers and exploring research opportunities than aspiring to get an A in every class. A's make for boring, one dimensional students. People who make priorities based on more complex factors than an arbitrary letter grade are preferable to interact and work with.
Don't waste the opportunity.
Access to a like minded peer group, and researchers to guide you is far harder to get outside of college.
For subjects like math and CS, these things are great substitutes. For things like mycology or religious studies, less so. I think there is something to be said for using your time in college to focus more on the subjects that are basically unlearnable via other channels.
For things like CS though, just sitting down and spending a weekend watching Tim Roughgarden's YouTube channel will give you more than enough algorithm and data structure knowledge to get a job as a developer or whatever.
I beg to differ. I wish college was just me in my room for three months and then a final. No hw, nothing.
Not because I learnt anything more in economics about CS, but because my first CS courses focused on Eiffel and object oriented programming: it was going to solve all our problems! We all think about objects naturally, so we should all program that way! It's the future of industry and science!
Instead, everything I learnt about CS has now been through trying to solve actual practical problems and applying them to the real world. I now have more experience with stats languages, taught myself lisp, and an employed doing analytics, a field and course that didn't exist and wouldn't have been treated seriously had I raised my objections to the curriculum back at uni.
Academics are more fad driven and fearful than they like to admit, even more so today now that industry dollars and popularity has increasingly permeated the academic system.
My story is a unique point in history you say, and it's unlikely to happen again?
On the contrary, I think it's even more likely to apply to today...
That doesn't make sense. There's no required connection to getting high grades and being one dimensional. That sounds like your own personal biased world-view more than how things must actually work in reality. If a person is competent, much less brilliant, and can score high in a class, what exactly is the law of the universe that says they can't work on side projects?
Additionally, our education systems reward repeated success and high marks, not exploration and failure. Thus purely from a stats and analytic perspective, the winning strategy to navigate through such a system is safe specialisation: which again, will trend towards one dimensional students who don't experience or seek out or tolerate failure well. This they stick to what they know, do not push past the limit offered by their graded courses, and tend not to put themselves out there to tackle/expose their weaknesses or areas they view as oblique to their field/strengths.
Show me someone with few failures, and I will show you someone who has never pushed our challenged themselves successfully...
When I was entering college I thought this would be what I'd do in my free time. Instead, it turned out that all of my peers were disinterested in these sorts of things. I still did projects and research and decent internships while having an OK GPA (~3.9) but this definitely isn't possible everywhere.
You got average grades and nothing unusual about you that would lead to scholarships? If you go to school the "normal" way you're likely to end up in huge piles of debt. Even if you go to community college first.
An open secret is location. Find a place in the country, or even another country, where college is subsidized for residents. Instead of going to community college in your home town, prioritize moving to that location ASAP.
Get a part time job, a crappy apartment, and start community college there. Pay close attention to their residency requirements to make sure you meet them as quickly as possible. Then transfer to the college of your choice and save tons of money
Isn't that the reason that pretty much everyone moves? Better jobs, better schools, less crime, etc...
I guess it can be seen as egotistical and selfish if you're the kind of person that doesn't like anyone to build housing that spoils your view. The NIMBY archetype
The Virginia state schools are very inexpensive for the quality, and I did two years in the community college system and then transferred to James Madison with guaranteed admission (because of agreements between the state universities and the community college). JMU wasn't a noteworthy CS school at the time, but I also had the option to head to Virginia Tech or University of Virginia, both of which have great programs (JMU offered a minor in music business, which is what made my decision).
Tuition was <$4k/semester for residents at the time (class of 2011).
Since college funding is usually on state level you have some latitude with where you initially move. Going to a community college in a farm town doesn't sound like a blast but it's probably the easiest way to make things work from a cash flow perspective.
Your friends/family are likely to think your "master plan" is crazy too lol
If you show genuine interest, they'll remember and favor you. That's how us the humans work.
Many community colleges offer guaranteed admission to state schools so long as a GPA is maintained. It can save the student tens of thousands in fees.
We here usually just average the grades from the courses. But on the other hand, nobody cares about that score and it's not written anywhere officially. Because teachers are different and schools are different, a C with one Prof could still be better than an A with another one.
For some reason I don't think this is common.
Plus you are defending an entire country. And much of our country's leadership class comes from the military, so it gives you a bigger say in where our country is going.
...and everyone knows that recommendations from writing professors are what helps you land the jobs that make the big $$$.
My luke warm insights:
- Stay fit, keep your back trained.
- Mitigate risks to your mental well being
- Socialize
- Do the work
- Take advantage of opportunities given to students (travel, discounts, university resources)
A's come with perks - seriously? Maybe when you're 6 that is a thing, when you're 20 I thought you'd grown out of that.
Asking questions in class - I hate these people, 50-200 people have to listen while some prima donna wants all the attention.
After one of my intro sessions, a freshman from Idaho blurted out: “Awesome class! It’s like you stuck my fingers in a light socket.” I laughed and invited her to speed walk with me around the local park - I guess arse lickers are everywhere.