John Mark Reynolds, Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, offers some great advice for those starting college. Excerpt:
* Attend music and sporting events. Study hard. Especially if you are going to a big ticket, private, or prestigious school/program, get everything you can out of it. Laziness is just as ugly in a college student as it is in an adult.
* School is your full time job, put fifty hours a week into it or go home.
* Do not be obsessed with “getting out fast” at the expense of quality.
* AP classes, CLEP, or IB classes are not equivalent to good college classes. If they are at your school, you should have picked a better school. Use those units to get into good (hard) classes and not to hasten the rest of your life.
* If you are obsessed with getting out fast, go all the way and do alternative college from home while you work.
* They are not going to let you go to college again. Enjoy it. On the other hand, five years for most students is long enough. Peter Pan the College Student is not so attractive.
Read the whole thing.