When I ask freshmen why they are in college, the most common answers are, "My folks wanted me to go," and "It just seemed like the thing to do." Anyway, it beats getting a job. Some freshmen have definite career goals, but most are undecided. The result is apathy, often leading to poor performance, failure, and dropping out.
Whatever your reason for being in college, the first imperative is to take it seriously. If you are the traditional college freshman right out of high school, you probably have many other things on your mind besides academics. Non-traditional students going to college after several years of non-academic pursuits have a real advantage. They tend to be more mature, more self-confident, more committed to success. Whichever, don't short-change yourself. As long as you are in college, resolve to do your very best. The stakes are too high to treat it as a game where you win some and lose some.
The day I graduated from high school, my aunt, who was a college professor, said to me: "You'll never feel as smart as you do today." How right she was! The more I have learned, the more I have become aware of how little I know. I think that the most unique feature of a college education is that it can open one's mind to the infinite reaches of knowledge that are known or waiting to be discovered. In the early grades of education, each topic was finite. You learned the alphabet, and once you knew it, that was that. You learned the multiplication facts, and once you learned them, that was that. Even in high school, if you studied Shakespeare, it seemed as if you learned all there was no know about his work. Each subject had a beginning and an end.
In college, every subject you study should begin to reveal an endless domain of knowledge. Your professors have spent many years studying their subjects, and they are at best experts in only a small aspect of their fields. The greatest value of college education is not in the actual content of what you learn. A college education prepares you for a lifetime of continuing education. It is not an education that you can "use" in the sense of technical and vocational skills. It is an education you can use to achieve a quality of life that goes beyond the necessities of life.
Coping with college life. Everyone has problems from time to time. If you are a "traditional" college student, by which I mean a person in the 18-22 age range coming directly from high school, college comes at a pivotal time of your life. It is a time of striving for maturity, independence, identity. If you are a non-traditional student, the problems associated with late adolescence are replaced by others that are appropriate to your status. Whichever, your first challenge is to resolve your personal problems or to insulate yourself from them enough to attend to your studies.
The key to successful coping with college life is self-discipline. If you completed the time-management schedule given in Appendix A, you know that there is time to do everything but not much left over to waste. One component of that schedule is attending class, and some students infer from the fact that college courses are based on the mastery concept that class attendance is optional. In one sense, it is. If you can manage to pass a course while cutting many classes, perfect attendance is not necessary. But you can not learn a subject as well if you skip classes, and you are also developing bad disciplinary habits. After all, going to class is a major part of your "job" as a college student. Even if you are paying full tuition, you are paying only a fraction of the cost of maintaining the institution. Good discipline implies good attendance.
If you have not already developed good self-discipline habits, it is imperative that you do so as quickly as possible. The best technique for acquiring self-discipline is called "contingency management." The essence of this technique is to list the various things that you need to do, and also the things you want to do, and arrange them in an order from the least to the most enjoyable. Then, working around your fixed commitments such as attending class, start doing them in that order...hardest to easiest, least liked to most liked. Along the way, include plenty of self-reinforcers. Whenever you complete a task, be it attending class or doing a homework assignment, take time to do something you really like. "Managing" the contingencies means to reward yourself for doing the things that need to be done.
In developing self-discipline, I urge that you NOT attempt to use self-punishment when you do what you shouldn't do, or fail to do what you should do. It is certainly appropriate to withhold rewards that you might have enjoyed, but do not inflict pain or discomfort on yourself for mis-behavior. It is well beyond the scope of this book to explain the effects of aversive punishment, but you are likely to do more harm than good with self-punishment. If you concentrate on rewarding yourself for doing what is right, such behavior will prevail without trying to punish yourself for doing what is wrong.