College Confidential:
How One College Student Makes it Work

By Mike Abrams

College is full of distractions.  A Thursday night fraternity party, for example, can easily cause you to sleep through a class on Friday morning. 

Take it from me: You'll do better if you engage in less debauchery.  Remember that you're in college, first, for an education.  Everything else has to come second.

Four other things I've discovered that will make college life easier.

1. Get involved in activities that will connect you with new people.  Whether you decided to go to a big state college or a small private college, you can get lost in the shuffle.  I joined a fraternity first semester to stay active and meet new people.  I know Greek life isn't for everyone, and you might choose to get involved with clubs or intramural sports teams.  The friends you make in college, in many cases, will be your friends for life.
   
   
2. Schedule classes well.  If you aren't a morning person, don't schedule 8 a.m. classes, because you will miss a lot of them.  I also recommend spreading out your classes through the week.  My first semester, I had no classes on Friday.  It seemed like a great idea at the time, but it also meant that I had four classes on Tuesday and five on Thursday.  One Thursday I had four tests, and it was my hardest day in college yet.  The next semester, I had three classes each day and it was much more mangageable.
   
   
3. Studying is extremely important.  Studying in college is much different from studying in high school.  In high school, tests only account for a percentage of your grade.  Essentially, if you do your homework, you can still do well in a class despite bad test grades.  In college, a lot of classes don't have any homework, and your whole grade is based on how well you do on tests.  You'll need to study twice as much and twice as hard for your tests.  Plus, college professors don't lay out the tests for you and tell you exactly what to study.  Anything they say or anything in the assigned readings is fair game.
   
   
4. Attend class.  There are no parents to wake you up and make sure you go to class.  In most classes, there is not attendance policy.  You don't get sick days or snow days.  You can't skip class because you have a cold, or because it's snowing and you just don't feel like walking across campus.  You will have classmates who skip class all the time, but don't be tempted, even when you think you know it all and going to class is just a waste of time.  The difference between an A and a B is perfect attendance.
   

Don't get me wrong.  You will have fun in college.  But you'll have more fun if you remember why you're there in the first place.

Abrams is a student at Indiana University studying business and journalism.