Advice for First- and Second-Year Students

Words of advice from a professor to her first year students
Getting your money's worth by take advantaging of "free" advice and help from
- Academic support staff: Your college has probably spent thousands of dollars employing and training an academic support team-- let those team members help you.
- Your professors are in their offices during office hours for one reason: to be available to help students. Most students do not take advantage of these student hours, which has two effects. First, you will probably be able to drop in during office hours without an appointment. Second, your professor, rather than doing nothing while waiting for a student to show up, will find something else to do while waiting. So, if your professor is doing something else when you drop by, you are not interrupting your professor's work--talking to you during office hours is your professor's work.
- Your academic advisor should, at the very least, help you choose appropriate courses. Meet with your advisor at least once a term. If, for some reason, you do not feel you have a good relationship with your advisor, switch advisors.
- The department secretary is a great unofficial source of support and information.
Going from high school to college is, for most students, a shock that may take a year or more to adjust to. One reason adjusting to college takes so long is because going to college is like going to a different country that has a very different culture. The tips below may help you adjust to this new culture:
- You will immediately notice that the college culture emphasizes freedom (e.g., you have more free time than in high school, attendance policies are less strict), but you may overlook that college culture also emphasizes responsibility. So, if you didn't do some assignment, you are responsible: You can't say that the teacher didn't remind you to do it.
- Like in any culture, there are many unwritten rules. Some rules are almost universal, such as
  - professors seeing what you may see as small differences between concepts as being hugely important.
  - professors being more interested in the general principle--the moral of the story--rather than in specific examples.
  - professors being more interested in you forming connections between lectures (they think you should connect today's lecture to the previous one and may even expect you to relate what you are learning now to what you learned in one semester to what you learned in another semester with a different professor!). Similarly, professors are more interested in your connecting ideas rather than on you just knowing individual facts.
  However, some of these rules may differ from teacher to teacher and from department to department. To help you navigate through these rules, it is good to have experienced guides (juniors and seniors). You can often meet those guides by joining a club affiliated with your major (e.g., if you are a psychology major, join the psychology club).
Students often sabotage their academic progress by taking--and then not dropping--a course that they are not ready for. Often, they take a course that is wrong for them because they did not ask for or follow their advisor's advice about the course or because they chose a course primarily based on what time the course was offered. Then, rather than figuring out from the syllabus or from their difficulty in understanding the course material that they are not ready for the course, they fail to drop the course. However,
1. Do not drop a class without first consulting with your advisor and, if you are on financial aid, without also consulting with your financial aid office.
2. Do not drop a course merely because you think it will put your GPA below some level that you have set--unless the grade will disqualify you for a scholarship or you are flunking the course. One grade will probably not have a big effect on your overall GPA--and your overall GPA will probably not have any effect on your life after college. Few employers care about how many times you were on the Dean's List, whether you graduated with honors, or even what your GPA was. Graduate schools do, of course, look at grades, but many put more emphasis on your GPA for your last 2 years than your first few years. So, your grades in introductory courses will probably not be important. Indeed, there are so many famous psychologists who did not do well in General Psychology that some have suggested (jokingly???) that getting an "A" in General Psychology eliminates any chance of becoming a famous psychologist.