Terrilynn’s Top 10 Tips for College Success: Finding Your Happy Place
Every year new students arrive at college. The similarities to high school end right after parents, siblings, mentors, and caretakers leave for home. If the media is to be believed, colleges will be enrolling students in despair. College has become a metaphor for lack of well-being, and many students have tuned out. Social challenges and upheavals aside, college is not high school. College is where you, the student, are put in charge of achieving academic and social results-and for many students, this total control of personal, academic, and social success happens for the first time.
By Terrilynn Cantlon — August 10, 2022
Tip Three: Write Something / Bake Something—Think Something / Make Something
Every year new students arrive at college. The similarities to high school end right after parents, siblings, mentors, and caretakers leave for home. If the media is to be believed, colleges will be enrolling students in despair. College has become a metaphor for lack of well-being, and many students have tuned out. Social challenges and upheavals aside, college is not high school. College is where you, the student, are put in charge of achieving academic and social results—and for many students, this total control of personal, academic, and social success happens for the first time.
It isn't like you haven't written a three-paragraph essay before or had a deadline. You have been to the library before, and you likely have some friends with whom you attended high school. However, college is different. The three-paragraph essay becomes a ten and twenty-page essay with a bibliography. When a student gets behind, academic deadlines become less avoidable and challenging to catch up on. Gone are the societal training wheels of helpful parents, family, and mentors in tow helping you in making your decisions. You have an essay due, a book you need to read, research to do, and an entirely new social milieu and finances to navigate.
Balancing Responsibilities
College will challenge you to rise to an entirely new level of responsibility. At every turn, questions emerge. Can you make smart decisions? Decisions are everywhere. Dorm or off-campus housing? Studying or partying? Reading or working? Saving or spending? Buying, renting, or checking out books from the library? Eating at restaurants, cooking at home, delivery, take-out, or dining in the dining hall? Planning for your success or following the crowd?
When I was a third-year undergraduate student, my mentor helped me to get fashionable red titanium frames for my reading glasses so that I wouldn't be laughed out of my first lecture with my dime store readers. I received instruction to continue sitting in the front—where I had earned my ride to college with scholarships. I am never surprised at how much effort new students put into decorating their dorms or apartments because you should have a comfortable place to get serious about academic work. Nothing is wrong with being fashionable or having a nicely decorated dorm. From observation, I've learned not to let people intimidate me because they had come to college in finer clothes or with different priorities and ways to achieve them.
Getting to the Core of It
The expectations of college are simple when boiled down. Read the syllabus and assignments, do your research and writing, and turn your work in on time. I also suggest new students read the Student Handbook for your college because it contains useful information. These responsibilities may sound easy, but if you enroll full-time and work a twenty-hour job to pay for housing, food, and books along with acclimating to a new social milieu, those deadlines and social commitments start adding up as the semester or quarter progresses. There's paperwork to keep up with and emails to check in your program. Unless you are well-to-do, you will eventually have to create a way to meet your financial, academic, social, and work expectations.
Combating Procrastination
In keeping up with coursework and assignments, it's crucial to understand that you cannot read five hundred pages and write your thesis with supporting evidence in forty-five minutes. Those who love writing essays and sharing our knowledge via public speaking are sometimes outliers. When the essay and public speaking deadlines loom, we become the most sought-after scholars for the disenfranchised in academia. These conversations with new students always start with— "I have an essay or speech due tomorrow" and end with a plea to "Please help me to generate the desired work product in the next forty-five minutes!"
If you are a procrastinator or need accommodation and are reading this, please realize just how preventable this existential academic problem is. Try to put as much effort into your academic work as you do in social life, clothing, computer, glasses, and room decora ting. The trappings of success are great. However, in college, work and your work-life balance should take priority.
I learned over time to get into a rhythm of academic work balanced with other things outside the college campus. Plan your education. Take control of what you are doing there and when you are doing it. This accountability keeps you from feeling like others are responsible for your lack of productivity, knowledge, or abilities. Books do not purchase or read themselves. Essays do not write themselves. Social life is great, but it takes more than being popular or well dressed with a nice computer to succeed. Remember, you are developing a way to be successful that you have not tried before.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
I learned to work on academic work for forty-five to fifty minutes and then take a ten-minute break. I always turned my phone off when doing academic work, so I could get my work done. If I wanted to know what happened in the world in the past forty-five minutes, I'd look up the news online for a few minutes before I started writing again. During that ten-minute break, I made something to eat, returned phone calls, cleaned my room, or had a coffee. I also got into the habit of explaining to myself what I thought I had just read and determining what I thought of it. As I walked around, I would ask myself: Did I agree with the writer? Did I see their point? If I disagreed, why did I disagree?
This practice allowed me to move from a passive "information regurgitator" to an active questioner of my education and used the information presented to make my argument. I learned to read opposing viewpoints. What counter-evidence can I muster to validate or invalidate a student's disagreement? So, forty-five minutes of writing something, then ten minutes of making something with new academic ingredients.
Thinking Critically
Thinking critically about the work professors, journals, pundits, and critics present is time well-spent. Before making a counterargument, you must understand the nuances of the argument. Thinking critically about an academic piece is easy when you have this simple tool. The five W's of reporting: Who, What, When, Where, and Why? These five questions help you deconstruct the arguments you are reading, watching, and learning while determining what perspectives are absent.
Start by asking yourself "Who is the person that wrote the piece?" What is their motivation? What things happened historically that relate to that historical moment? Why is what they write about important to you? Who does it affect? Write something, make something, think something, bake something. You will be a much happier student in college when you put yourself in the position of being responsible for your education!
Terrilynn Cantlon
Terrilynn Cantlon is a graduation speaker of a large public community college and a select women’s college high-achieving graduate, a poet, and presently writing “Paradise Found Book II: Escape from Eden.” Her many academic highlights are Teaching and Tutoring across the curriculum. Her passion is teaching English Literature and The Academic Essay, while empowering students to write their best work with a strong academic voice and a solid foundation in the Art of the Essay.
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