How to Succeed At University--International Edition. Danton O'Day
There are lots of time wasters. We won’t list them now. First, we don’t want to give you new ideas about how to waste your time; that’s not the function of this book. Second, there are some real time-wasting pitfalls that should, or more correctly, must be avoided. These will be discussed in Chapter 12.
If you decide to live in residence, you will face the maximum number of these pitfalls. There always seems to be a party going on somewhere in the residence. If you are a social type you might find yourself being asked to go to a lot of these. We won’t say don’t go. What we will say is this: go only if you have time. Have you done all your work? Do you have an early class the next day? If you respond yes and no, in that order, then go. We’ll deal with time wasting again later on, but now let’s look a little harder at living in residence.
Living in Residence
Yes, living in residence can provide the road to a fantastic social life. That road can be dangerous, but it need not be so. The great benefit of residence is that it places you very close to university facilities. You won’t have to waste a lot of time commuting. This will give you more time to devote to your studies and your social life. By not being a commuter, you will be living in a community of students with the same goal as you—getting a university degree. You will develop friendships that will likely last longer than the three or four years you spend at university—perhaps a lifetime. But you will have to remind yourself continually that the reason for your stint in residence is to succeed at university, not just to have a good time. Like real butterflies, social butterflies don’t last very long.
Developing good relationships with other students in residence will provide a valuable aid to your success. If you need some information, notes or other data for your studies, it will never be more than a short walk away. This will maximize the time you can devote to your work.
Most universities have some residences and some can accommodate a large number of students. They will range in structure from multi-roomed townhouses where you and your housemates will share cooking, cleaning and other household duties to bedrooms in high-rise towers where you will live like a guest in a hotel with linen provided and meals served in the dormitory dining room. Sometimes you will have a choice of accommodation, but more often you won’t. Depending upon availability, you may only be able to get into residence if you live out of town or have some other reason for needing university accommodation. If you are interested in living in residence, show your interest early, as accommodation may be awarded on a first-come-first-served basis.
If you share accommodations with other university students, remember to respect their needs and wishes. Do your best to be a good roommate. If you are not comfortable in your residence, this will very likely interfere with your progress as a student. If you do have troubles, try to talk them out with the people involved. If that doesn’t work, then try the residence adviser or someone else in the residence or housing office. Often the wrong people are put together, but with a few complaints and a little shuffling of student bodies, it doesn’t take long to get the right combinations together.
What Do Grades Really Mean?
There is an age-old argument about the meaning of grades. Does the grade a student gets really reflect what he or she has learned?
At least in the minds of others, your achievement at university will be demonstrated by your grades. We believe that in the majority of cases grades do truly reflect the student’s performance as perceived by the professor. The professor is an expert in his or her field and, by this token (a standard academic phrase, by the way), the professor’s assessment of you indicates how well you have lived up to what he or she expects of students. However, there is some underlying learning that no professor can ever hope to judge. You will gain something from each class that no other individual will. Your uniqueness will allow you to glean information that others will miss. Possibly you will not realize it until years later, but you will. If you learn as much as you can in each class, the grades will come by themselves.
Now that’s our philosophy. But this is not a book on the philosophy of education. It is about survival and succeeding at university. Grades are important. That’s the truth. It’s a fact. If you get lousy grades, prospective employers will not be impressed. To our knowledge, there are no lawyers, teachers or scientists who had a 60% average at university. If you have poor grades, any postgraduate programmes to which you apply will not accept you. Although the specific requirements vary depending on programme, institution and country, on today’s grade market you generally need a well-above-average grade to be even considered and usually a much higher grade to be accepted. In short, you need excellent grades to have a good shot at achieving your post-graduation goals.
Now the problem at hand is to deal with that fact. How can you get above-average grades? If a student is intelligent enough to be admitted to university then he or she has the potential to get above-average grades. It will take more work for some than for others, but knowing the rules will help.
The only way for a student to get good grades is for him or her to do all required assignments and to learn as much of the material as well as he or she can. Good grades are an offshoot of knowledge. There’s no way you can fail if you do your work and study.
However, as noted previously, students typically don’t do very well in their first year at university. For many the freshman experience is a wake-up call that spurs them on to greater success. For others, it’s an academic death knell, causing them to give up and drop out. Others just keep hanging around passing some subjects and failing or dropping others. More and more students are falling into that last category. For that reason, as mentioned earlier, the average time it takes for a university student to graduate with a “four-year” Bachelor’s degree is now over five years. In fact, on average, less than 80% of students complete their degrees in five years! But all is not lost. Why? Because simply having the Bachelor’s degree is sufficient for many jobs. Having a degree shows that you can stick with and complete something. While your marks may not be excellent, you have proven that you are mature enough to face the challenges and finish what you started.
Having said that, it’s important to note that some jobs and, of course, getting into postgraduate programmes require reasonable marks as well as the degree. So, if you’ve been doing poorly in your first couple of years, does that mean these opportunities are lost? Not at all! While you may not accepted to a prestigious school for further studies you have other options. The same goes for getting into that highly regarded company or landing that well-paying job. While your early marks may not be impressive, many companies and postgraduate institutions look at your success in the last ten or so classes that you have taken. Many realize that the first years are the most difficult. If you can improve over time, this demonstrates your growth as an individual. So rather than thinking all is lost, you can refocus your efforts to increase your grades in whatever subjects or time you have left. That effort will be repaid with more opportunities for your future.
Is It Worth the Trouble?
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
—Thomas H. Huxley
Why should I go to university? Is it worth all the hassle to stay in school? Should I go out and get a well-paying job while I’m young instead of wasting three or four years of my life? If you have asked yourself any of these questions, consider the following facts—(1) there are jobs out there for university graduates and (2) the university experience will give you competence in a large number of areas essential for survival in the working world.
Did You Know?
Although the statistics vary by country, type of degree and field of study, in general the employment rate for those with a university degree is higher than