What's college like?

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I'm starting college too on august 20.

Me too
You in GA?

The biggest question is whether you'll still be living at home or moving out.

If you move out, I think you will learn a lot more about living than you do about whatever you're studying. You'll be responsible for everything... cooking, cleaning, laundry, budgeting, studying, etc. This is a great learning experience. Of course, it has it's challenges, but it will be worth it.

You do have to be motivated. If you're not interested in what you're studying you probably won't have the motivation to finish assignments, etc. But the people are better; most of them are there because they want to be there, not because they have to be.

Better than HS in some ways, but in many ways it is just worse. Also, getting a degree doesn't guarantee you a good job anymore, unless you go into Engineering, Medicine, etc. College is overrated. Guidance counselors lie to everyone saying that you need to go there because they are paid to do it. That is how universities make money. If you could somehow get into an Ivy league university you are guaranteed to be eligible for good jobs though. Many companies only hire Ivy league grads.

College... what can I say... it saved my ass. It kept me from continuing as this guy who's fooling himself thinking he's got a chance at certain things.
College has turned me into a completely different person, and all for the better.

The amount of personal attention you can expect varies tremendously depending on your major. For instance, I began my college career as a computer science student. I was in the honors college of my school, which meant most of my freshman courses were small -- the core courses anyway, english and calculus and such. My engineering courses, however, and most non-honors courses could have as many as 300 students in one classroom for lower level classes.

Art students, on the other hand (such as myself now) tend to have no more than 20 or 30 students in a class -- artistic and aesthetic concepts are too hands-on and require more individual consideration than can be made into a lecture.

Hey nekoguy,

zee says it very well here, but whatever your decision was to study, whatever your choice of career to prepare for, all the more power to you if you made the choice that's ideal for you. This is where going to college is a very different ball game than going to HS. You choose the school, you choose your major, and you are there with students who want to be there rather than have to be there.

OTOH, like zee says, if your choice wasn't the best for you, you could be in for another HS-like experience. Best case scenario: you made the best choice in your interests and you'll be in for the time of your life, school-wise. Worst case scenario: if the choice you made wasn't right for you, you can discontinue whatever you chose to study and re-think your choice some time later, maybe as a mature student.

As I write this you are probably already working on your assignments and getting a good idea of what you got yourself into. Whatever the outcome, good luck!

Actually, I've decided to start college next year in order to get an idea of what I want to major in. For now, I'm just taking a break from school and trying to look for a job. Wish me luck.

I've been to three different colleges now and I can tell you one thing: BYU is not AS friendly. The kids were okay, but I think a religious college is just not the right environment for someone who is different. I loved the community college I went to in CA, it was very low key as far as activities go because the student body at that type of college is more spread out and doesn't want to go to dances and stuff hosted by the school. The school I go to now, kind of, is in an even more spread out population and it's hard to make friends because people go to school and then to work. I now live at home, but at BYU I lived in apartment style dorms with five other girls. My room mate thought I was a freak, but everyone else was cool with it. That's my two cents, I guess. Good luck!

It depends on your school. I've attended three colleges, and the professors were great on all them. Always willing to speak to you one-on-one about anything.

ITs really easy to get involved in groups/organizations and to start your own projects. When I was graduating I was thinking, "Gee, I barely did anything. Look at all this stuff I could have done." Then the director of the student activities center emailed me to say she wanted to nominate me for "Who's who among American College students" because I had been so actively involved, and had done so much for campus. Only one other person on campus was nominated that semester. I've been a peer mentor, brought guest speakers to campus, completed the 7 habits of highly effective people workshop (taught by the uni president), attended leadership retreats and workshops, and changed the way my school assigns email addresses (the old way aided in identity theft though I was apparently the only one to notice that), and some other stuff. Next week I'm going to be a campus tour guide.

I found teh academics to be amazingly easy. My high school GPA was 3.2. I'm college valedictorian, having graduation with a 4.0 GPA and QPA. And theres a good chance I'll be graduating from my master's degree with 4.0 too, though unfortunately my degree doesn't offer enough credits for me to be named valedictorian again.


One of the greatest keys to success in college is to visit the text books website - you'll find that most professors take at least some of the exam questions from the sample test questions there, often times verbatim. Memorization also helps. By my junior year I had polished my memorization skilsl so well that I could memorize a text book chapter verbatim in an hour. I found that to be more beneficial than my notes, but then my notebooks all look more like art doodle pads than notebooks. In some of my english classes, I'll have a page of drawings surrounding one line of notes written in short hand, using abbreviations I forgot by the time the class eneded.

Youngstown State University in Ohio was the greatest for making friends - you'd have to make an effort to not make friends there. The surrounding communities are the same way - its very friendly. IN the 1930's John Steinbeck wrote that about that area, and in the 1990's so did the journeyor for National Geographic who passed through there. The friendliness of the people is what I missed most when I transfered out of YSU, and my college isn't unfriendly by any stretch.

If you can't get in now, take Harvard distance education courses online (anyone can take them undergrad or graduate credit). Then once you have 4 or 5, and have maintained a B or better average, transer in to Harvard, or use them to transfer into another ivy league school. I don't have the money to afford the classes now (being as I'm attending another grad school fulltime), but I'm taking the syllabus from the courses of the program I like and attempting to do as much of the required reading/writing a paper as possible now. Sure those may change when I enroll in the classes next year, but doing this years course work will give me an edge that will help me next year.

College is a crazy place. If I could do it all over again I probably would have never went in the first place.