Blog #3

Secrets to College Success

Annie Murphy Paul’s article, “Secrets of the Most Successful College Students,” sums up several points from Kevin Bain’s book about advice for how to get the most out of your collegiate experience. I thought that this article gave some solid advice, and I found it interesting the three categories of learners that she describes. Throughout middle school and high school, all I knew was to get good grades. My parents and my teachers always emphasized the importance of GPA when applying for schools. For that reason, I was a strategic learner for most of my education, and still catch myself sometimes hanging onto the same habits. I will sometimes find myself procrastinating to study for a test, which in return causes me to gain little memory of the information I was learning. Last semester I tried to start the year looking at my classes in a different light, because I was in mostly classes related to my major. I paid attention with the mindset that I wanted to understand the material, not just learn it and then forget once the class was over. It is definitely challenging to retain this mindset, but I found that it helps in applying it in everything that I do. For a while I was coasting through life, but now I am constantly working on myself to become better each day.

There were some very valuable pieces of advice in the article that resonated with me. The first being “Get comfortable with failure.” I had never failed a class in my life until my freshman year of college, and I had no idea what to do. I felt like I was doomed, and that my parents would never forgive me. Obviously, this wasn’t the case, I retook the class and passed it and my parents were nothing but supportive. I was trained to only see the As and Bs, and so seeing an F caused an immense amount of stress. Since then, I don’t look for the letters but instead just try my best in every class. If you put your all into everything, you will never feel bad for how things turn out because you know you gave it as much as you could. I finally understood that failure is important, and necessary. The second piece of advice that stood out to me was “Make a personal connection to your studies.” I don’t know a lot of people who actually enjoy school. I like learning just as much as the next guy, but I’m not sure I would put school in the ‘fun’ category. But with that being said, one thing that I have learned to love about school is making personal connections to the material in my classes. This doesn’t work for every class, but once I got into my major, I started truly focusing on relating concepts to my own life. I also think that this can be looked at in the sense of combining what you’re learning and relating it to what you’re passionate about. I was never sure where marketing would take me, but I have always wanted to work in entertainment. For some odd reason, I had never looked into marketing jobs in entertainment. Once I finally put them together, I realized I wanted to do entertainment marketing, and have been looking for ways to use the concepts in my marketing classes and apply to an entertainment perspective. 

I encourage every college student to read this article, and apply the advice to their own lives and see how it helps them grow.