More Tips on How to Tackle College Academically

Many people say that high school was the toughest time of their lives, but for many others who have experienced college, that is just not the case. Many people will tell you that their senior year in college was the hardest, but the truth is, once you're a senior in college, you should already have clear cut goals about what you want to do in life, and you should be able to define yourself pretty well. That is why freshmen year is the hardest in college.

Just coming out of school, it can be difficult to determine what it is that you would like to do later on, what type of person you are, what makes you happy, what moves you, etc. The transition from childhood to adulthood is a difficult one, and it all starts when you're a freshman. Granted, finding out about your life is not just a one year fix: it is a combination of your experiences and decisions that will ultimately decide what path you will take. Even so, freshmen year is vital to understanding what it means to be on your own. Freshmen have so much going on with academics, trying to find a sense of inner self, trying to keep in touch with old friends and family, here are some tips on how to tackle your first year of college life so you can spend more time at peace with yourself.

Prioritize

You want to save the world, cure AIDS, eradicate wars and starvation, and.....do Calculus? Prioritizing is essential to maintaining a strict, disciplined and productive schedule (in addition to sanity). In order to develop yourself into a productive person, your first step is to find out what is urgent and pressing in your own life. Curing AIDS might come later, but before you even take a step out into the world you need to graduate. And in order to graduate, you need to ace this Calculus 1 class. In order to ace this Calculus 1 class, you need to get an A on the first midterm. So you see, if you don't organize your college priorities, then your life will seem like a jumble of different ideas, dreams, and goals that will never be realized if you don't sit down, meditate, and think about things step by step.

In addition to organizing and prioritizing things philosophically, you need to prioritize things in your own life on a day to day basis. If you have a major test coming up, drop your homework assignments (for now) and go study. It is imperative that you tackle your largest problems first. Many people think that they can get all of their small tasks and duties out of the way, but when Tuesday rolls around, you find out that you've set off your largest task: studying for your Wednesday test. Oops. Make sure that you time everything correctly and efficiently. Kids think that college exams will be the same as college exams, but that is never the case. Don't be the freshman that learns things the hard way. Be prepared. And even if the test isn't that hard, be glad you were able to ace it. Stop thinking about forgone opportunities.

Study Smart

The truth is, not all classes in college will be of the same difficulty level. If you find that this is the case with some of your classes, then delegate difficulties in your brain accordingly. For example, health is not going to be a top priority with respect to Calculus. If you so happen to have two assignments or exams due or coming up within the same time period, make an effort to study more for Calculus (unless your major is health related or something). Being able to see which load will be larger and which will be lighter is a great help in determining how you should spend your time. If you spend equal amounts of time on classes of varying difficulties, you may be hurting your chances at the harder one.

Be Healthy

Freshmen have the tendency to let loose now that the parents are around, but they find that their sleep, health, grades, and weight all suffer. These are extremely important things, as your health is the most important asset in your life. Keep on track with the signs of your body. If you are hungry, then eat. If you are tired, then sleep.

The cycle that happens for "Freshman 15" to take place is that students will not sleep, and then they end up getting hungry in the middle of the night, giving them the urge to order gratuitous amounts of food and shove it down their throats. Eating that much in itself may not be that bad if you are exercising, but if you don't sleep, your body won't have the energy to metabolize the food quickly, leaving your fatty cells with room to grow and giving your skin a unhealthy, pale puffiness. Not sleeping leads to bad grades, no matter how smart you are.

Rise early

It is customary for students to go to sleep late and wake up late. This not only makes you more tired than you normally would be, it increases your chances of heart attack (got your attention?). In order to maintain very little amounts of energy and to feel as fatigued as possible, feel free to play Warcraft until 3 A.M. and skip your classes to finally wake up when they're all over (I won't lie, I've done this).

Remember that you pay tuition money for a reason, and that college should be an investment in your own knowledge base. If you wake up early, you'd be surprised at how much energy you have and how much more productive you can actually be by going to your classes and listening intently. Maintain the standards of normal human life by sleeping at night and waking in the morning. If there was no purpose for this routine, then why would the 6 billion humans in the world follow it?

Learn the first time.

The worst thing you can possibly do to sabotage your college career is to not learn things properly the first time they are presented to you. Some people pay 20% of their full attention in class, so maybe they picked up a few bits here and there, but they don't have a great overall picture of what the material presented should be like. Come test time, they are scrambling to learn what they can, but the problem is that they don't know what they should learn. From their perspectives, they went to class, paid some attention, and learned everything halfway. What is there to study? Besides not knowing what exactly there is to study, it is a big time waster to try to piece together the material and pair things up in order to finally learn it. Learning things in a systematic order is the best way to do it, because teachers teach material according to an order. And there is a reason to it. Waiting to debug your problems and find things out in random order makes for a jumble of information that's sure to help you fail.

Of course, even if you manage to somehow master these tips of advice even before you enter college, know that college will not be easy. But who wants to be someone who isn't in control of his or her own study habits? This is the first step you can take to understanding college, and although there are many other tricks, tips, and ways of getting through college, know that your brain is your best study aid. Actually, it's your only study aid.