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Do the reading, homework, and assignments as soon as you can, and sleep well.
Buy a vehicle that looks like the campus maintenance vehicles and get easy parking around campus.
Go to office hours and ask thoughtful questions, you can network with both students, staff, instructors, and TAs, everyone is your network.
In some universities its cheaper to not buy a parking pass, and just pay the tickets (assuming its infrequent enough).
I can’t say I know anything about the parking/car stuff as that sounds very US-specific, but I can second everything else.
Don’t get complacent with the work, stay on top of it, and if you ever feel yourself falling behind, don’t be scared to ask for help. Literally everyone wants to see you succeed, but the further you fall behind the harder it gets.
At the same time, allow yourself to have some fun too.
Do the reading, homework, and assignments as soon as you can
100*this. It can look tedious and you might not really see the point of what they want you to do but…
Even Uni is just a school. You have to jump through the hoops. You will be far more relaxed if you do that than if you do everything last minute and then fail some assignments due to turning it in late. Pluspoint being, if other students get to know you to get things done, they will want to work with you in group assignments.
It’s soo much working with the system than fighting it.
Even Uni is just a school. You have to jump through the hoops. You will be far more relaxed if you do that than if you do everything last minute and then fail some assignments due to turning it in late. Pluspoint being, if other students get to know you to get things done, they will want to work with you in group assignments. It’s soo much working with the system than fighting it.
Also, nobody is forcing you to be there. You’re there for you, so don’t be a dingus and waste that opportunity.
Do what it takes to pass your classes in university, but prioritize finding an internship or entry level job for your career. No one cares about your GPA, but all entry level jobs want experience.
To avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of graduating and never getting a job because they want experience, and you can’t get the experience unless they give you a job, get an entry level job in college and try to get extra responsibilities in that job for your resume.
The best advice.
No one told me how important internships were. I still got a job but I definitely was behind my peers. A lot of them left for top companies. My first job wasn’t nearly as good and it took me several years to start making the same pay they were.
If a bartender asks for an ID and you’re under age, dont give them shit, just them doing their job. Along the same lines, RAs arent doing their shit for fun most of the time. Ignoring check-in rules are fine, ignoring week day quiet hours is not.
Living on campus can cost more but you are more likely to go to school events when its a quick walk versus driving. On the other hand, its easier to party a bit too hard when its always around you.
Walk through every hall at least once. Maybe you never take a class in that one, but you might miss out on seeing a nice mural or some flyer.
Getting involved in clubs can help make you friends, I was in college band and other than the hard work, it paid plus made a ton of friends along the way
Don’t buy the textbooks. You probably don’t need them. If you do, buy a used one from another student for 1/100th of the price or get an online copy.
I’ll leave this here for all your free text book needs https://libgen.is/
Also your mileage will vary depending on the book/edition, but a lot of times a “new edition” of a textbook is just a transparent cash grab by the publisher and is 99% the same material with different page numbers, so it’s worth asking the prof/a TA if the previous edition is pretty much the same. You can generally get “outdated” editions of a textbook for startlingly little money. Like I’m talking sub-$5 for a book that’s $140 new sometimes.
When I was a TA for a gigantic intro class they’d just released a new edition of the book we used but they’d only sent us two desk copies (publishers send free copies to professors who teach out of their textbooks), and the class was run by a professor and three TAs, so the TAs all had to share one copy of the new edition and taught out of the old edition 90% of the time. They’d only changed one chapter, so the professor scanned that one chapter to PDF and we handed it out to anyone with the old edition.
We also had, for some reason, like five boxes of the old edition under a desk in the department office and gave them out to anyone who would take them. You can hardly give old editions of textbooks away.
Been out of college for years now, but pick a quality backpack. Sounds weird, but between work and school and whatever else, sometimes it feels like you live out of that thing. Maybe that was just me
Yup. I bought a Peak Design backpack. Cost me something like 230 bucks but it’s such good quality and a well-thought out product. Still use it daily now, about 10 years later and as good as the day I bought it.
In every class, try to score as high as possible on the first assignment/exam. Since less material is covered at that point, less effort is required per unit of results.
Then later in the semester, you’re free to put your effort where it’s most needed, instead of needing to scramble across all your classes because you need good results on the final assignments just to pass.
Also, in subjects with group work, it lets you survive a bad group, rather than failing your course because you get stuck with some maladjusted dingus. Moreover, you can use your high grades on the first assignment to leverage your way into a good group. This kind of group-work metagaming is especially important in engineering subjects, and doubly so again if the course is bell-curved.
Finally, try to do one creative thing per year and put it in a public forum, especially on a platform you control (e.g. a blog). Even small things are OK. Literally having any body of work outside of class assignments will let you crush 90% of your peers when applying to grad school, a job, a scholarship, or really just about anything with a halfway sane selection process. It’s also fun (doing creative things, not crushing your peers).
I would say with the bad group thing there are two things that massively improve your chances: A) being group leader and B) sometimes being okay with doing a majority of the work and just asking people to do cleanup. I’ve had so many projects go faster from doing all of the hard parts of the project on the condition that they make it look polished.
I’m… more hostile about this one. If I’m going to do the lion’s share of the work anyway, I’ll often go the extra 10%, do it alone, and take full credit.
I’ve tried your strategy, only for the group to turn something practically publishable into a failing-grade undergraduate report. After that when I got a bad group, I just ask the prof if there’s a penalty to go solo (often there is none!). If I estimate the penalty is less bad than my grade with the group, I’ll just let them burn. If I get at least a mediocre group, then I try to make the group succeed.
This tactic has served me well in the workplace. If I’m part of an incompetent or lazy team, I move to a new team or do the work myself, and make sure they get no credit. I don’t carry these teams forward, neither I nor the company benefits, and them I’m stuck carrying them again on the next job (a quick path to burnout). Pretty quickly I end up working with better colleagues and we can really get stuff done (after all, most people are OK).
Yeah I totally get that. I’ve been fortunate enough to have teams where at least half the other people gave enough of a damn haha
Not really a “hack,” but literally just prioritize the things you care about.
I feel like there’s so much pressure when you’re young to be excelling in literally every field. You’re expected to be getting great grades while also having the time of your life at parties while also doing extracurriculars, and so on.
If you only care about resume building, just focus on grades (and extracurriculars if you’re in high school). It’s okay to not have friends and get terrible sleep, school is only temporary anyways!
If you only care about appreciating life, that’s valid too! Functionally there’s often no difference between a 70% and a 100% as long as you make “the cut” to get into college/a job/whatever.
Objectively, the only thing you should not be neglecting is your health. To be perfectly honest, sometimes you will just need to pull all-nighters to get your priorities done. Don’t make a habit of it.
Also, one last controversial opinion: Office hours are useless if you already know the material, you shouldn’t just be attending office hours by default.
C’s get degrees.
I don’t agree with the no friends part, uni/college is one of the very few places in your life that it will be (relatively) easy as fuck to make good friends, partners and acquaintances.
You’re depriving yourself of an amazing experience if you just burn through it like someone’s after you and only care about grades.
I agree. College is really the first time in a school setting where the people you see on a daily basis are there because they share the same interests as you. You have the opportunity to make friends based on that, instead of the fact that you happen to live in the same postal code as them. This means you have the chance to hit it off with people from all walks of life because you all have one interest in common already. And those friendships can last your entire life and even possibly land you a job because you work in the same field.
Academically, make sure to start off each semester well. It’s much less stressful to have some As and Bs at the beginning in case something comes up or you bomb a test, rather than starting with an F and attempting to climb out of it.
Socially, be fun and get to know people but don’t be a drunk asshole. Your peers may interview you for a job one day and it would be bad if they remembered you as a drunk asshole.
Financially, start off in community College. You can still find some that are only $1-2K for tuition and books per semester. It’s so much cheaper than starting at a 4 year university. Also check the pricing for living somewhere near the campus vs the dorms. At my university, the dorms were about 2.5 times more expensive than living with a roommate 5-10 minutes away.
Explore a bunch of different paths by taking different electives. Also don’t put all your elective classes in the first 2 years, life will be much easier in your last year of college if you only have a couple high level classes and a PE class or an elective class that you can enjoy and relax with. Finally, don’t be afraid to change your major.
Highschool money making hack: Take note of the vending machines and what they sell. Figure out what they don’t have that people want, then buy it in bulk at the store to sell at school for profit.
At my school they didn’t allow soda in the vending machines, so I made bank selling cans of Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew out of my locker for $1-2 each. I remember earning enough to buy an iPod and that was pretty much all I was doing it for.
This might be rudimentary for some folks, but anyone like me: meet with counselors regularly to make sure you’re on-track for graduation!
I was my own counselor. I used the course catalogs to determine what courses I needed to take to graduate. I thought I was doing well til I found (during what I assumed was my last semester) that I needed additional math credits and anothet credit in some other weird category to graduate. I took summer courses of Pre-Calc and Bowling to graduate a semester later than expected.
Right, also be mindful with changing majors as it can mean there’s new requirements. Had to go take another foreign language two years after taking my original major’s amount. Was not the most fun trying to pick it back up
I switched majors and had to take a whole extra year because of when final level classes were offered.
Holy shit. Me, too. Yes, nothing quite so sad as Bowling For Diplomas.
Lol no kidding. Glad we made it out the other side! I’m assuming you’re from the US as well?
Aside from the initial class meeting, my bowling credit was largely “independent study”, meaning I just had to log 9 games a week at the school’s rec center bowling alley.
I mistakenly did the math one day. I don’t remember the figures (thank goodness) but I’d have saved a lot more money than I thought (for a cheaper state school) just…bowling 9 games a week at the local bowling alley.
But where’s the prestige of a college credit approved by my professor, a fella that I think played Lollipop Chainsaw on the Xbox + “Party in the USA” over the PA every day I went in that summer? Lol
Yup. I am. My professor was pretty good about it, though, knowing a lot of us had to commute for his class. He calculated the average strings per hour, then let us comp out to an A. Some of us had to make up two gym credits, so he offered to let us comp out both gym classes just bowling, letting us skip the “lifestyle fitness” class.
But yeah, never do the math. The gym class is just a moneymaker for them.
Having at least a few hours of sleep between all that shit you studied and your test will get better results than pulling an all nighter to study like 4 more hours. First of all, your brain sucks balls at information storage and retrieval when you’re exhausted. And second of all, sleep is when your brain organizes all the new info you picked up, so you will actually remember more of what you studied after you’ve slept.
Don’t sleep on your university’s career services office.
Or if youre first gen/low income TRIO can be a great help
Join study groups, and when others ask questions, explain the answers as best you can in your own words.
This was key in study retention.
For high school: your body will really want to go to sleep at 2 am every morning, but don’t. Go to bed at a regular time. You might not like it at night, but in the morning your body will love you.
For college: Don’t cheat. It might be super tempting, but if you’re caught even once, the consequences are so much worse than in high school. Plus you’re setting yourself up for failure in the future. Do you really wanna be the guy who cheated their way through college only to end up with functionally zero experience in a real-world scenario where you have to apply what the job thought you learned? Hell, most jobs will probably see right through you and deny you on the spot.
Also whatever your brilliant-ass cheating scheme is, your TA has probably seen it 27 times already.
Also that thing where you go mess up the headers in an empty or irrelevant file and pretend your homework got corrupted to buy yourself an extra day was invented pretty much at the same time as electronic homework submission.
Not really a hack but I love using loose leaf paper with triangle holes that’s reinforced with tape. It’s called “College Ruled Reinforced Paper”. My papers don’t constantly rip out anymore.
Also I like refillable notebooks. They’re regular notebooks you can refill and much lighter and easier to carry.
