How To Make College Easier: Self Care, Be Proactive, and Do The Reading

Here I give three key tips on how to make college easier:
The first is to take care of yourself, with special emphasis placed on getting enough sleep and having a regular sleep schedule, and also eating regularly and well. Staying adequately fed and well-rested ensures you will be at your best when sitting down to work.
The second tip is to be proactive, which includes
My final tip is to actually do all assigned reading, in all classes, in the time-frame in which it is assigned. In my experience, from talking to people, very few people actually do this, but the students who do this are often the ones who perform the best grades-wise, and for whom college seems or feels easiest. In some cases, just doing the assigned reading on-time is enough to ace the tests without a lot of effort, whereas failing to do so can translate to failing the tests, even if you try hard to study for them.
I share some personal stories about my own experiences in college too, as they relate to these points.
I hope people find this helpful!

[@LMessi10Ibrahimovic9]

This is actually great advice, hope you get more exposure.

[@AlexZorach]

Thank you! I know it's not the "sexiest" topic or advice out there, but I think it's important and could help a lot of people!

[@sylviaodhner]

One thing I learned in college was that for me personally, doing the reading before the class was often not the best use of my time, because reading was one of my weakest academic skills - I was a lot better at getting stuff out of class and figuring things out. And often the teacher would cover the material in class anyway. So rather than doing the reading before class, I would look at the textbook afterwards to clarify anything I found confusing, and also study the textbook before exams (which is a different process for me than just reading it).

[@AlexZorach]

This makes sense that the advice about always doing the reading first wouldn't be best for all people and in all cases. I think maybe I didn't explain fully in the video, but that advice mainly applies to the cases where the professor expects the class to have done the reading. In some cases, the reading is more supplemental. Many professors are clear about this both verbally on the first day of class, and in the syllabus. But in some cases, they aren't, and it can be useful to ask them. As you point out, the best strategy to balance focus on reading vs. in-class attention also depends a lot on the individual student's abilities, i.e. their relative strengths and weaknesses. That said, there definitely are classes where there is specific material covered in the reading that is not communicated during lecture, and in that case there isn't much getting around doing the reading. This can be a challenge for people who aren't as good at learning from reading, but I do think that learning from books is a skill people can develop. When I started college, I wasn't anywhere near as good at learning from books as I was by the end of college. My first semester was very hard in terms of me absolutely needing to set aside large blocks of time just to do reading. By the end of college, I found that reading material at a similar difficulty level had gotten a lot easier. One more thing, I've had a few classes where I was finding that the lecture reiterated the reading to the point that I was getting little to nothing more out of the lecture. In these cases, especially since the classes didn't end up being required for my major, I just dropped the class. My thought was, I'm paying SOOOO much to be here, why pay to learn something I could just learn on my own? So people may have this experience and it can be good. Incidentally, I DID go back and learn those subjects on my own, quite thoroughly (biology, mainly.) In a couple cases, I kept the textbooks and dropped the classes, then read the books cover to cover (usually not during school, at this point I just kept it and returned to it later). This can be a good choice for people who are taking a class for fun and then find they like the book more than the professor's lecturing style. Anyway, thanks for your comment! This stuff is definitely a good bit more diverse than I made it out to be in the video. It's hard to cover all the possibilities without making the video too long! I will say, please check with the professor though before skipping reading, because many professors DO require the reading and WILL put material that is only in the reading and not in class, on tests.