One Step At a Time

Despite college sometimes feeling like a sprint – especially when you’re rushing through the end of an exam, trying to answer questions you’ve skipped, or are frantically tapping out the final paragraphs of a paper that you need to e-mail to your professor in three more minutes – college is a long, arduous road. Some would say that it’s marathon. It might be, if you plan it right. In fact, that’s the best case scenario. Let me explain…

For some of you, each day helps inform the next day. You preview your course material, you go to class, you study alone, you review with a group, you get help when you need it, you take your exams, you do well, and you keep building. You take what you learn in your introductory courses and apply it to intermediate and advanced courses. You tutor other students, which helps solidify your understanding. You look for other ways to apply your knowledge – maybe writing for the school paper to nurture your journalism career, or working as a research assistant in a lab to get hands-on experiences in the sciences, or balance the books for a local business as a student accounting intern. All of the pieces fit together and keep pushing you forward, one step at a time. It’s a long road to walk, and it won’t always be easy. But at least you know where you’re going, and you can confidently keep making moves.

For other students, college is a marathon of sprints and stops. Imagine twenty-six miles of sprinting for a mile or two, then slowing to a walk, crawl, or stand-still, then trying to pull it together to sprint again for another mile, then stopping again. Worse, imagine sprinting portions in the wrong direction, because you have no clue about where you’re supposed to be going! No one runs a marathon like that. If you make it to the end, it will take who knows how much longer and your body will hate you. For a good number of college students, this is the unfortunate model you try to apply to your lives in school. The cramming and late nights, the poorly thought out study strategies, the skipping classes and then trying to make up for it by copying someone else’s notes, the limited use of the many academic resources available to you, the distractions and procrastination, and the many other things that get in the way of what you’re supposed to be doing. Sometimes the biggest things in the way of your success in college are you own ideas of what college should be like (The Daily Graduate #47). You think that it’s supposed to be a marathon of sprints, and not a well-thought pace that you set and manage. When you don’t know that you’re supposed to make a better plan, you won’t make one. When you don’t make a plan, you won’t win. When you start seeing a ton of C’s and D’s, you’ll begin to worry, but you still may not know what to do. There is another way. You can go higher… one page at a time.

(Photo Pierre Verdy/AFP/Getty)