30 Things about College

I recently was on a panel for the FIRST Ladies conference at the University of Minnesota and someone asked what was a piece of advice we had for someone entering college. That question stuck with me and was what prompted me to come up with 30 more pieces of advice. College is the only time in your life when your only real responsibility is to learn. Try to remember how lucky you are every day and that it's a learning opportunity. 

1. Your friends will change a lot over the next four years. Let them.
2. If you don’t already have a refillable water bottle, get one. Water fountains are few and far between in college.
3. Adjust your schedule around when you are most productive and creative. If you're nocturnal and do your best work late at night, embrace that. It may be the only time in your life when you can.
4. If you write your best papers the night before they are due, don't let people tell you that you "should be more organized" or that you "should plan better." Different things work for different people.
5. Become friends with your favorite professors. Recognize that they can learn from you too - in fact, that's part of the reason they chose to be professors.
6. Embrace the differences between you and your classmates. Always be asking yourself, "what can I learn from this person?" More of your education will come from this than from any classroom.
7. All-nighters are entirely overrated.
8. Backup your files. There is nothing quite like deleting an entire semester’s worth of material before an important test or presentation.
9. Take risks.
10. Welcome failure into your lives. It's how we grow. What matters is not that you failed, but that you recovered.
11. Take some classes that have nothing to do with your major(s), purely for the fun of it.
12. Find a place where you feel inspired and motivated and go there often.
13. When you're living on a college campus with 400 things going on every second of every day, watching TV is pretty much a waste of your time and a waste of your parents' money. If you're going to watch, watch with friends so at least you can call it a "valuable social experience."
14. No matter what your political or religious beliefs, be open-minded. You're going to be challenged over the next four years in ways you can't imagine, across all fronts. You can't learn if you're closed off.
15. Don't always lead. It's good to follow sometimes.
16. Take a lot of pictures.
17. Your health and safety are more important than anything.
18. Ask for help. Often.
19. Half of you will be in the bottom half of your class at any given moment. Way more than half of you will be in the bottom half of your class at some point in the next four years. Get used to it.
20. In the long run, where you go to college doesn't matter as much as what you do with the opportunities you're given there.
21. Make a complete fool of yourself at least once, preferably more. It builds character.
22. Wash your sheets more than once a year. Trust me on this one.
23. Make a point to shower regularly.
24. Don't be afraid of the weird pizza topping combinations that your new friend from across the country loves. Some of the truly awful ones actually taste pretty good. Expand your horizons.
25. Explore the campus thoroughly. Don't get caught.
26. Life is too short to stick with a course of study that you're no longer excited about. Switch, even if it complicates things.
27. Tattoos are permanent. Be very certain.
28. I guarantee that at least someone in your class has the same water bottle or writing utensils as you, make yours easily identifiable with a sticker of a dinosaur or something.
29. Learn the textbook hustle. Don’t automatically buy books from the bookstore, there most likely is a cheaper version on Amazon.
30. Be careful about letting people borrow stuff, it’ll probably come back broken or stained.

I was inspired by this blog post written by Ben Jones from MIT.