{"id":454,"date":"2006-08-03T11:26:02","date_gmt":"2006-08-03T11:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/03\/precollege-advising\/"},"modified":"2006-08-03T11:26:02","modified_gmt":"2006-08-03T11:26:02","slug":"precollege-advising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/03\/precollege-advising\/","title":{"rendered":"Pre-College Advising"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’re still a month away from the start of classes at most schools, but over at Learning Curves, Becky Hirta has some advice for new students<\/a>. Some of this is university-specific (“Dress in layers. The University Center is never above 70 degrees; the math building is never below 80 degrees.”), and other bits are matters of practical finance (“You don’t need a shiny new computer. Save your money.”), but the general advice is excellent.<\/p>\n

There are a couple of things I especially want to highlight, starting with:<\/p>\n

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Often your instructors will tell you exactly what to do. Pay attention to these directions and follow them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Absolutely. I have this problem every year, with some of the things that I require on homework, quizzes, and tests. Most of the students are good about it, but there are always a few who just refuse to believe that I’m serious about the formatting things that I ask them to do.<\/p>\n

I’ve found that I can reduce the number of problems by clearly explaining the point of the requirements (“This is to help you avoid falling into the traps that I fell into when I was a student…”), but there are always a couple who don’t believe me. Well, when your professors tell you to do something, please believe it.<\/p>\n

(More below the fold.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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I know a lot of people who’ve gotten into academic trouble by playing too many computer games.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Oh, God, yes. Watch out for the video games. And I say this not just as a stuffy professor type who doesn’t play video games, but as someone who had a good chunk of his junior year eaten by Super Tecmo Bowl. I got phone calls at two in the morning demanding that I come over and play videogame football, and I did it<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

We also have:<\/p>\n

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Joining a Greek-Letter organization takes about the same about of time and money as taking a two credit-hour course. If you decide to join, be sure to plan for the commitment.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We don’t run on credit hours, but the general point is a sound one. I’ve had a number of students come through my classes who were pledging one fraternity or another at the time, and they all struggled to deal with the time committments.<\/p>\n

Contrary to the common student image of faculty, I don’t have any particular objection to Greek organizations. I wasn’t in one myself, because Williams got rid of fraternities almost thirty years before I got there, but I played rugby, and that’s about as close as we got. I did my share of outlandish trouble-making stuff, and I’m not shocked or horrified by the very idea that current students might do the same.<\/p>\n

That said, you need to be aware of the trade-offs. You can put yourself in a deep, deep hole if you get too wrapped up in non-academic pursuits, and it can be really tough to get out (I had a professor suggest to me that I should “cut my losses” and hand in incomplete homeworks, rather than continuing the path I was on. That snapped me out of it, and I spent a weekend in the library finishing a lot of old assignments.). You need to know what you’re getting into, and make sure you can adjust as needed.<\/p>\n

Finally,<\/p>\n

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There is more to taking notes than merely writing down the glyphs that appear on the board. Decide why you’re taking notes and how you are going to use them. Then be intelligent about what you choose to write down.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This probably deserves a whole post of its own. Note-taking is an essential skill, and the sooner you learn it, the better you’ll do.<\/p>\n

The problem is, it’s also a very individual thing. Different note-taking methods work for different people, and there’s not much other than trial and error that will let you figure out what the best strategy is for you. For some people, it’s just that the act of writing things down fixes them in memory, while others need to be able to reconstruct an entire lecture later in order to understand things.<\/p>\n

Personally, I mostly got by on the “if I write it down, I’ll remember it later” thing, at least in college. Problem is, that only works for a little while– I still have my notebooks from my undergrad physics classes, and I occasionally look back at them when I’m wondering how to present a new topic, but most of them are next to useless. With effort, I can reconstruct what was going on, but most of it is a horrible jumble.<\/p>\n

I’ve got a couple of notebooks from grad school that are better– I could just about lecture out of my E&M notes– but that was mostly because the professors teaching those classes did a good job of making it easy to follow what they were doing. You can’t really rely on that.<\/p>\n

The other problem with this is that it’s been a solid ten years since I last had to take detailed notes on a lecture. I’m not sure I remember how to do it any more, and I definitely don’t know how I would advise students to go about it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re still a month away from the start of classes at most schools, but over at Learning Curves, Becky Hirta has some advice for new students. Some of this is university-specific (“Dress in layers. The University Center is never above 70 degrees; the math building is never below 80 degrees.”), and other bits are matters… Continue reading Pre-College Advising<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}