Apparently, people in college think that having more than three classes in one day is really hard.
What?
You people went to high school, right? Don't you remember when you had seven classes every day and the homework for those classes was due the next day? What is wrong with you?
I guess after mere months of having your classes spread out, the idea of attending more than two classes in a row is daunting. It is not unlike kindergarten where you take a nap in the middle of the day so you don't suffer a nervous breakdown. So good news! College is just one big kindergarten. I am sure that at some point, I will sympathize with people when they complain that they have four classes all on the same day, but right now all I can think about is when I sat in class for seven hours, went to work for five, and then did homework for three EVERY DAY.
Gosh, people, stop being kindergarteners. Weirdies.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Those Darn AP Books
You are a Peaker. Therefore, you bought and *maybe* used a bunch of AP books for all of your super hard classes. Well guess what, you should keep those babies around. If you feel a great need to sell them, you can, but you will probably wish you hadn't because they are very useful study tools for actual college classes.
These books can provide sample problems to practice with, vocabulary lists, summarized readings, and other such goodies. Admittedly, some classes will very closely follow the content of the assigned textbook, but still, AP books can save you a lot of work.
Also, consider the fact that some college textbooks may not explain the little details of all of the concepts they cover because they are too hoity toity and advanced to bother with such trivialities. When this happens, you can use your AP books (or even the actual textbooks from that high school class) to fill in the gaps. My Spanish textbook this year is useless when it comes to explaining grammatical concepts. Yes, I know that I have already been taught these things once, and I know that in an ideal world I wouldn't need reminding, but I also know that it is shockingly easy to mix up the pluperfect subjunctive and the past perfect indicative. Imagine that.
Don't feel like you have to cart all of your high school textbooks and prep books to college with you, but if you know that you will be taking a Calc II class and it has been two years since you took AP Calc, then it might be helpful to have something from that class around to help you out. You can always use your extra books as brown-nosing fodder by showing up in your Proff's office with an old textbook and asking if the sample problems listed here on this page would be helpful for the upcoming test or if it would be better to look at these over here. I smell sympathy points!
These books can provide sample problems to practice with, vocabulary lists, summarized readings, and other such goodies. Admittedly, some classes will very closely follow the content of the assigned textbook, but still, AP books can save you a lot of work.
Also, consider the fact that some college textbooks may not explain the little details of all of the concepts they cover because they are too hoity toity and advanced to bother with such trivialities. When this happens, you can use your AP books (or even the actual textbooks from that high school class) to fill in the gaps. My Spanish textbook this year is useless when it comes to explaining grammatical concepts. Yes, I know that I have already been taught these things once, and I know that in an ideal world I wouldn't need reminding, but I also know that it is shockingly easy to mix up the pluperfect subjunctive and the past perfect indicative. Imagine that.
Don't feel like you have to cart all of your high school textbooks and prep books to college with you, but if you know that you will be taking a Calc II class and it has been two years since you took AP Calc, then it might be helpful to have something from that class around to help you out. You can always use your extra books as brown-nosing fodder by showing up in your Proff's office with an old textbook and asking if the sample problems listed here on this page would be helpful for the upcoming test or if it would be better to look at these over here. I smell sympathy points!
Monday, February 4, 2013
Four Years
By now we are all used to the whole "spend a succession of years in a category" thing. Three years in middle school, four in high school, 12 years as a child, eight as a teenager, six years in an insane asylum, etc. So four years in college seems like the next natural step - except it's not four years.
You need to start thinking about college as eight semesters. This is a key distinction because each semester is independent of the others. This isn't like high school where you sign up for classes four times and your classes are a year long and it's all divided up into four neat little segments. Granted, you will apply for housing four times, and the freshman through senior system works for four years, but pretty much everything else should be considered in terms of semesters.
There are a significant number of greater implications with the whole eight semesters thing, but I am currently eating a banana and it is hard to hold it and type and chew all at the same time so you are just going to have to wait a few posts to find out what they are. You might possible be waiting forever because this post was boring anyway so chances of me revisiting it are slim. Bananas ho!
You need to start thinking about college as eight semesters. This is a key distinction because each semester is independent of the others. This isn't like high school where you sign up for classes four times and your classes are a year long and it's all divided up into four neat little segments. Granted, you will apply for housing four times, and the freshman through senior system works for four years, but pretty much everything else should be considered in terms of semesters.
There are a significant number of greater implications with the whole eight semesters thing, but I am currently eating a banana and it is hard to hold it and type and chew all at the same time so you are just going to have to wait a few posts to find out what they are. You might possible be waiting forever because this post was boring anyway so chances of me revisiting it are slim. Bananas ho!
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Visiting Campus: Scholarship Competitions
A lot of schools have competitive events where they host a hundred or so students for a weekend and at the end they award one student a scholarship. These events are like the hunger games, except they don't tell you when you die so you have to just keep on fighting and sucking up and killing people even if you're pretty sure you were brutally murdered in the first six minutes. This also means that you could very well be killed by someone who is already dead. Sucks to be you, you just got zombied.
If you attend one of these weekends, keep in mind that they never stop watching you. From the minute you sign in, they will be taking notes and analyzing your behavior. Make sure you are always having a friendly, meaningful, and mildly intelligent conversation with someone. You need to seem like the kind of person who will automatically make the whole campus more happy just by being on it.
Make sure you ask intelligent questions - ones that CAN'T be answered by your event packet or by a basic troll of the website. Have a list of twenty or so questions that make you seem insightful, curious, open-minded, and/or unique. For example, at a Christian school, you can ask "In what ways do you include faith in class on a regular basis?" Ooh, now you have told them that you love Jesus, care about your faith, advocate for yourself, and have the ability to brown-nose. Everyone needs to learn how to brown-nose at some point.
Wear something distinctive but not weird or edgy - a slouchy beanie, or a brightly colored shirt, or something. That way, people will remember you more easily.
Do your best to show your leadership skillz but never seem like a dictator. Yeah, good luck. You can't ever be sure what these people are looking for, but they don't want a Peeta who just paints himself into a rock for three days.
So, to sum up: try to avoid being zombied, ask good questions, never stop talking to people, wear a hat, be a brown-noser (but subtly enough that they can pretend they don't notice), don't paint yourself into a rock.
If you attend one of these weekends, keep in mind that they never stop watching you. From the minute you sign in, they will be taking notes and analyzing your behavior. Make sure you are always having a friendly, meaningful, and mildly intelligent conversation with someone. You need to seem like the kind of person who will automatically make the whole campus more happy just by being on it.
Make sure you ask intelligent questions - ones that CAN'T be answered by your event packet or by a basic troll of the website. Have a list of twenty or so questions that make you seem insightful, curious, open-minded, and/or unique. For example, at a Christian school, you can ask "In what ways do you include faith in class on a regular basis?" Ooh, now you have told them that you love Jesus, care about your faith, advocate for yourself, and have the ability to brown-nose. Everyone needs to learn how to brown-nose at some point.
Wear something distinctive but not weird or edgy - a slouchy beanie, or a brightly colored shirt, or something. That way, people will remember you more easily.
Do your best to show your leadership skillz but never seem like a dictator. Yeah, good luck. You can't ever be sure what these people are looking for, but they don't want a Peeta who just paints himself into a rock for three days.
So, to sum up: try to avoid being zombied, ask good questions, never stop talking to people, wear a hat, be a brown-noser (but subtly enough that they can pretend they don't notice), don't paint yourself into a rock.
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