This may be the most important lesson in life, so you may see this one come back as a Daily Graduate from time to time. It’s (almost) never too late to get help. I add the “almost” because if you’re in the middle of a midterm or final exam, and you realize that you should have gotten a tutor or gone to the review session a couple of nights ago, then yeah, right then in that moment, it’s too late for this round. You’re going to have to deal with whatever grade you get. But still, you can get help. You can take the exam to a tutor, grad student, peer, TA, faculty member, or someone else who knows the material, and walk through your mistakes slowly so that you understand what went wrong. You may not see the point in this, especially if college is just about grades for you. But if you want to learn, then there’s always time, even if it’s after your exam has been turned in.
The B-side of this has to do with getting help before it really is too late. On Friday I pointed out that for most schools, the Fall semester will be coming to an end shortly. Maybe you haven’t gotten a tutor yet for a tough class, or formed a study group, or gone to office hours, or had anyone read any of your papers (that, coincidentally, you haven’t done so well on). You can fix that right now, for these last few weeks. You can decide to keep things as is, too shy/proud/lazy to make a move, or you can decide that you want to get the most out of the few months you’ve already put into this semester. All you have to do is take the first step and get the help you need. Even if it’s just one class, try it and see how it works. You’ll soon see that getting help isn’t as hard as you may have thought it was, and more rewarding that you imagined in your shy/proud/lazy state.
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.
There’s more than one way to learn. Understanding your strengths and then making sure you are playing to them as much as possible is a key to academic success and personal confidence. (See this link for more information)
One of the many ideas I talk about in Higher Learning is the choice that students often have to face — do I learn the material or do I try to do well on the exam. Seems like this shouldn’t be an either-or, but those of us who’ve had to read a three-hundred page book, write two short papers, study for a midterm, and do a lab report all in 48 hours (in addition to having some semblance of a college student’s life… which could mean 48 hours of studying or 48 hours of not studying, depending on how disciplined one is) understand that there are choices to be made. When you start your work earlier, you can choose to go deeper, and learn more (Daily Graduate #38). It takes time to get to this point. You have to get into a good groove with your overall studies, activities, and time management, so that you can truly understand how much time you have to work with. You don’t want to sabotage yourself when it’s time to study by not leaving enough time to do a good job.
Once you’ve gotten the hang of things on campus, you’ll get a better sense for which classes you want to truly explore and which you want to excel in but stick more closely to the minimums on the syllabus rather than diving deeper into your own additional research and readings. You have to be strategic about this, because at the end of the day, your ultimate constraint is literally the end of the day. You won’t be able to do everything, every day. But if you learn how to learn more effectively, and you set your sights on getting more out of class and campus, then you’ll be going into the balancing act much better prepared than other students who have no idea what they’re doing and end up solely focused on surviving exams rather than thriving. Put yourself in a position to thrive. Go Higher!
There’s one basic truth about college life. This truth remains through life after college as well, though it’s sometimes less recognizable, perhaps because post-college, you know a little more about what you’re signing up for. College, on the other hand, is supposed to be filled with days of aimless fun, and random moments that stretch into hours of the free-est time that one could ever image. That’s certainly a part of the picture. And then you have the other twenty hours of your day, when you’re in a lab writing code, at a library table reading through a stack of books, or in front of your laptop trying to write the perfect paper (for the fourth time this semester).
We call this “the grind.” And the only way to get through it is to get through it (Daily Graduate #35).
There’s no way to sugarcoat this – studying is difficult. Becoming proficient at solving mathematical equations, learning the ins and outs of international commerce, getting fluent in the artistic milestones of given periods, understanding reactions in cells, and the many other things that we try to wrap our minds around involves a commitment to working with a ton of material over and over again. The best learning (ie, being able to actually remember and apply something) is built on taking simple steps, getting them down solid, practicing/applying the knowledge, and moving on to the next step. Most things are built on foundations; you don’t forget these, so you need to make sure that your core knowledge base is solid. Fast-forwarding is never a good idea. Worse when you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s going to take time and patience. You will have to find a certain comfort zone, if not an appreciation for the mental pain.
This blog entry came to me last week as I realized that in many of my post-college pursuits – teaching, writing, entrepreneurial stuff – I’ve been doing a lot of the same things over and over again. I’ve revisited thoughts and ideas, re-read texts, re-had conversations, and re-did plans. I’ve gone through a lot of the same motions, sometimes leading me to dead ends and other times opening up unexpected doors. It’s all been a learning process, which is the best that one could hope for, especially given the years that have been put in. The joy in the struggle and process is found when you repeat those same steps, but you realize that this time around you’re stronger, building on past experiences (rather than starting over), and climbing higher. Whether its solving a problem set or cranking out the third draft of a business plan, you have to run around the track a few times before you can get to the finish line. With each cycle, make it a point to learn and grow. Only then will you finish as strong as you possibly can.
