Advice on Becoming a Better College Student

(From a former well known Lake George Sr. English Teacher and Mentor Larry Allen and his student Chris Wells)

1. Make education your second strongest priority in life, leaving biological and physiological needs the first priority.
2. Develop a deep interest in learning various subjects.
3. Learn to incorporate technology into your methods of doing work, such as calculators, laptops, and computers.
4. Become an avid reader. This is vital to the student, because the top 5% of students read 144 times more than the bottom 5% do.
5. Develop a symbiotic system with teachers and learn to be interdependent at times, although this society tends toward 'independence.
6. Learn to dissipate fear associated with leaning, as fear can interfere with the processes 'involved 'm understanding and learning things.
7. Work on shutting out distractions that invade your mind, so you can improve your efficiency.
8. Learn to go beyond the boundaries in courses, as some of the outside information may improve your understanding of concepts in the course.
9. The library can be an excellent place. It allows you to continue your readings, do your homework, do research that may be needed for assignments.
10. Become good at adapting to teachers' needs through observational learning and learning from mistakes.
11. Gain confidence in yourself when you need to talk with teachers about issues facing you in the course or to address problems you have.
12. When choosing group members, make sure that your weaknesses can be overlapped by your partners' strengths, giving you a well-balanced team for some projects that may be assigned.
13. Take faith in your own brain's unlimited capacity of long-term memory.
14. When using short-term memory, use chunking to improve your ability to remember several things at once. Chunking is a technique that enhances short-term memory through grouping of items and uses of mnemonic devices. Short-term memory has its own limits on capacity, but can be augmented systematically through chunking.
15. Train your brain to become capable of soaking up information that it receives as you read textbooks, observe the blackboard, and listen to lectures.
16. Learn to forget the limits that once prevented you from improvement. Once you see through your limits, you can do almost anything.
17. Learn to love challenges, regardless of difficulty and type of task required to surmount them.
18. If you want to accomplish something, you have to apply effort, as effort can turn dreams into realities.
19. Do not allow stereotypes to impair your progress, and learn to ignore them completely. You have complete control over your life, not things like drugs, stereotypes, other people, etc.
20. Never allow a foreign language, such as science, math, another language, to intimidate you. Take time to learn how each part works with others and what relationships they have.
21. Learn to plan ahead as you progress through college courses.
22. Procrastination is the biggest enemy that can affect academic abilities.
23. Work on becoming goal-oriented. It helps a lot in college courses, as it allows you to focus on different parts during different times.
24. Learn how to turn tests into something you really enjoy doing. They dictate most of your grades in many courses.
25. If you like TV, try to tune to educational channels, such as PBS's Nova, TBS's National Geographic, TLC, History Channel, or any program that presents non-fiction to viewers.
26. Sometimes it helps to apply principles you learned in college to real life, such as applying a newly acquainted physics formula on a sports event.
27. Never give up or surrender. Giving up means you are a quitter and quitters will not get around in life well.
28. Keep a highly positive attitude in college, even when enduring a battery of tests during the final weeks. Negative emotions can impair learning and can sometimes increase the likelihood of contracting illnesses when the immune system is slowed down by these emotions.
29. Learn to view events in a new light. People who are stuck in their old ways may not make new discoveries, but those who find the new light will ultimately discover something of value.
30. The teacher can be a great tool, beyond his/her teachings. He/she can answer any questions you may have, provide you with companionship when you feel you need some, help you solve personal problems that have been interfering with your academics, and even help you accomplish some goals by giving you new techniques. The teacher is really a multiple-purpose person who is willing to help students through courses.
31. A brain is the most terrible thing to waste with drugs and bad beliefs. Keep it clean with positive ideas about the world and with good health.
32. It us actually possible to teach an old dog new tricks when you help it gain interest in learning new things. Our brains are constantly working and learning throughout our lives. Learning itself is really a life-long process and is need not cease whey you get your degree or diploma.
33. Learn to focus your thoughts like a laser. In reality, our brains shut out about 90 to 95% of whatever it receives from stimuli in the world. However, some people have great difficulty with shutting out these things. Focusing can increase the amount of information shut out up to 97% or 99%.
34. Develop studying as a passion, as it is somewhat similar to reading or refreshing the mind with the concepts it once learned. Studying can make a big influence on college grades, as well as being an active leaner.
35. Sometimes it is possible to study almost anywhere, including riding the car as a passenger, watching a sports event, or simply resting in your house. Become a mobile studying unit, as the turtle always carries his "house" or shell with him anywhere.
36. Repeated attempts with an assignment can lead to evolutionary improvement, as mistakes are detected and corrected while the work is being "filtered" several times. It is like fractional distillation, where you continually filter substances out of a mixture until you have the right material, using many techniques.
37. When you are stuck on a concept when the teacher was explaining it to you, you may have to allow him/her to explain it in another way so that it will be acceptable to your own systematic. Concepts can be explained in different ways and these ways work for different people who work under different systems or jargon.
38. When other students are showing the teacher their work in the classroom, there may be ways that can potentially expose their own errors to your mind. This can happen when the blackboard is being used, and you can learn to adapt your old answers to circumvent the errors others have exposed. At times, multiple failures from others can help a person know the right way, especially when the concept is difficult.
39. The textbook, which is the standard of all college courses, is really more like a Swiss army knife; it has multiple purposes. It can help you study for tests, understand the concepts before the teacher starts discussing them in lectures, help clarify any difficulties you may have had, and even provide you with examples to improve your understanding.
40. The newest type of resource, the Internet, can be used to help you with any outside information on the concepts. Boolean algebra, with words AND and OR, can reduce the numbers of entries in some search engines and improve your chances of finding the right sites. Sometimes the internet can help you find a part to focus during research when the library is lacking in sources.
41. Last of all, enjoy your college courses and the experiences that come from life-long learning that will be re-activated. College is not the torturous route that most people perceive, but rather an opportunity to expand knowledge into the outside world. Newly acquired knowledge will surely help you in your remaining years of life.