Ten Survival Tips

Here are ten tactics to help you not only survive your undergraduate education, but thrive and excel.

1. Take responsibility for your education.

Having chosen your degree and major, you are presented by the institution with a list of requirements. Each requirement is a specified course. If you earn the credits for all of these required courses, you will be given a diploma. It is difficult enough to make this happen that many students do not think much about what that diploma represents. It means that you have fulfilled the minimum requirements set by the institution. This is typically less of an education than you can get by paying the same amount of tuition but by also paying more attention to your choices and the opportunities they present. The institution will not force you to do everything; in fact, it will not force you to do much at all. If you want a deeper, more complete, more rewarding education, you must take responsibility, and continually think about how to get the most out of any given situation during your time at university. Elementary school forced everyone to do just about everything, giving you little or no choice. But the voluntary choice you made to attend university is just the first of many voluntary choices you will make while here. If you always take the easiest, least challenging route, how are you going to develop the flexibility and adaptability needed for the best careers?

2. Attend lectures.

Attendance is required at most elementary and secondary schools. There are no such restrictions at university. The freedom to skip classes can be irresistible, particularly when there are tedious or dull sections. The danger in missing lectures is that you don't know what you have missed, and it's not easy to find out, because you'll get only a partial picture from your classmates. It is safer to attend, but bring some discreet work that you can do while keeping one eye on what is going on at the front. Using a laptop for anything other than work related to the lecture you're attending is dangerous; it's too distracting, both for you and those behind you. A better choice is homework from another of your courses, or a nice work of fiction. The Dana Porter library has many of the world's great works of literature sitting on the shelves waiting for you. For some of them, I can remember the classroom in which I read them.

3. Learn to take notes.

Unless the instructor reads every word on the slides and says nothing else, there is additional information being conveyed in lecture that must be retained. The best instructors add considerable value, through their lectures, to the printed materials available to you. You will not remember much about a given lecture without further annotating, summarizing, and adding insights that occur to you as you are listening. Taking notes is about more than recording information; it is about engaging with the material. Even if you never look at the notes again, the act of taking them helps you to remember. If you get a chance to watch a doctor or lawyer in action, you'll often notice that they are taking handwritten notes as they speak to you. This is not the only way to remember things, but you shouldn't assume that everything you understand about a topic at the end of a lecture will be in your brain two months later.

4. Develop a window longer than one week.

Extending your planning beyond the short term will help you deal with crunches that tend to occur around the time of midterms, near the end of term when major projects and papers are often due, and during exams. You can reduce the impact of these stressful periods by getting things done early. In senior courses, often assignments are longer, with two weeks or more to do them, but students who don't break out of the "do what's due this week" pattern will find them too much of a burden. When I teach CS 492 on the social implications of computing, near the end we discuss the effectiveness of course activities. I ask students to write essays every week, and some students, in this discussion, complained that they weren't given enough time, and that two weeks for some topics would allow a more in-depth treatment. "If I give you two weeks," I said, "will you use the first week effectively?" After a whole term of analysis and challenging of preconceptions, they could give me an honest answer: no, they admitted, they would use the first week to work on other courses, and get started on their essays in the second week. Most students never realize this weakness. The need for time management doesn't go away when you graduate; if anything, it gets more acute.

Even in first year, when many courses have work due each week to help students adapt to a university workload, taking a somewhat longer view will help prevent unpleasant surprises. If you can just manage the regular schedule of assignments, how are you going to find the time to study for midterms? What happens if you fall sick for a few days? A comfortable cushion of time provides insurance, and if it's not needed, you can treat yourself to some well-deserved leisure while your classmates are stressing out.

5. Learn actively.

Don't sit stationary in class hour after hour. Don't study for exams by reading the course notes and textbook over and over. Every teaching term, I have students come to me in distress following poor performance in their midterms. Sometimes it is the first time they have ever failed a test. I ask them what they did to prepare, and they talk about reading the notes and textbook, period. Maybe they used a highlighter, which is a good way of making you think you've done something when you haven't actually done anything at all. You need to take an active role in your learning, taking notes in class, and studying by making up problems (or at least taking them out of the exercises in your textbook) and solving them. Much of your education is devoted to giving you the ability to do certain tasks, so practice by actually trying to do them.

6. Do more than the minimum required.

The set of assignments in a course represent the minimum practice that the instructor feels is necessary to master the material. You can nearly always benefit from more practice than that. This is particularly true if you do poorly on an assignment or if you skip it due to time pressures. Think of the extra practice as preparation for the final exam, which it is, and as preparation for using the material after the course is over. This relates to point 1 above: if you take the view that you'll only do what you're forced to do, you impoverish yourself. The instructor is doing you a favour by identifying this minimum set; do yourself a favour by going beyond that.

7. Earn marks by understanding and retaining material.

Marks during the term are intended to be a diagnostic to identify your weaknesses so that you can work on them; the final exam is an assessment of what you have learned. Students often try various strategies to increase their marks without necessarily increasing their learning, such as writing nonsense down in the hopes of getting part marks, cramming the day before an exam, and getting "help" on assignments. These do not always work, and even if they work in the short term, they leave you in a weakened and vulnerable state for subsequent courses or when dealing with workplace problem-solving. Would you try to change the numbers on a battery of medical tests ordered by your doctor? If you could fast for a week and "pass" your cholesterol test, would you do it?

The best way to earn marks is to really focus on learning the material. If you earned poor marks, ask yourself why. Look at the written comments on your assignment, and look at the model solutions, if they are provided, to learn where you went wrong. Schedule some time to do similar questions to make sure you really understand. If you earned good marks, don't rest on your laurels. A marker can't read your mind, and can't interactively probe a potential weakness. Ask yourself: were the marks you earned deserved, or are they an artifact of a marking scheme that didn't identify the places where you need to do more work?

8. Distinguish data, knowledge, skills, and strategies.

There are many different kinds of material learned at university. Data consists of relevant information; knowledge organizes data to make it more useful. These are the categories most often discussed in course outlines, which are frequently just a list of topics. But the real goal of a course consists of skills that you can use to complete tasks, and strategies which encapsulate the wisdom needed to know which skills to deploy, when they are appropriate, and for what reasons. Skills and strategies are harder to teach, harder to learn, and much easier to forget about in the day-to-day rush; furthermore, they are usually not made explicit, and sometimes have to be inferred from the design of assignments or the choice of examples in lecture. Learn to identify them and work on them.

9. Take advantage of office hours.

Office hours are time set aside by an instructor, tutor, or teaching assistant (TA) to answer your questions. These people report that they often see a few "regulars" and others who come in from time to time, but they never see the bulk of their students, who are consequently anonymous to them. Think about how much you would have to pay someone with that level of skill to help you. E-mail and newsgroup queries are useful, but not a substitute for face-to-face interaction. Office hours are underutilized, and they shouldn't be. Students often want to use instructors as references for graduate school or permanent jobs. Ask yourself if your instructor can say anything about you that your transcript won't reveal. If not, then you have lost an opportunity to make a deeper connection with someone who can help you. That could have happened in office hours.

10. Study over a long period of time.

Your brain needs time to assimilate knowledge and to reach a deeper level of understanding. Try to avoid learning something just before it is to be used or exercised. Your learning will be more shallow if you do this, and less likely to be retained. Don't grind away on learning. Learn to recognize when you are not making progress, and put it away for a day or two, returning with a fresh mind and attitude. If you start early enough, you will have time to do this. Conversely, if you stay up all night cramming, you may be able to memorize what I call "data" above. But you will be in worse shape regarding skills and strategies, which require a clear head and concentrated effort to wield successfully. Furthermore, you are likely to forget the data, meaning that you're left with a hollow victory, the shell of a credit or passed exam without any meaning or purpose to it.

Many of these tips fall under the heading of "common sense". You are here to get an education: if you continually examine what you are doing to make sure it adheres to the spirit of learning, and isn't being done just to satisfy a deadline or the letter of some specific requirement, then the things I have mentioned above will come naturally to you. If not, then you will get a piece of paper and some numbers, but you won't get an education.