University can be the most transformative time in your life, if you allow it.
I’ve been a student at Brock for over four years now and I’ve written for three Beginner’s Guide publications in the past here at the Press. My last three contributions to this special edition of the paper were either technical guides or unorthodox advice you wouldn’t hear anywhere else.
Seeing as this will be my last Beginners’ Guide instalment, I want to go broad and use my now undergraduate-length experience as a student at Brock to impart what I would consider the most important advice I could give a first-year student. At a glance, this advice is fairly straightforward: it’s your choice to make university significant or not. In other words, making university worthwhile is a mindset.
Higher education is becoming more expensive every year. What’s more is that working in the field, or an adjacent field, related to what you studied in university is also hardly a guarantee for many graduates.
Given that university today is a much larger investment than ever before with student loan debt at unspeakable levels, it is more important than ever for students to make use of every iota of resource the university offers to maximize their experience. This means a diametrically opposite attitude to that of clocking in and out, a familiar mode of being for anyone who’s worked a menial job.
Students going through the motions is something I’ve seen far too much of in my time at Brock, and it’s depressing.
The student who maximizes their university experience is someone willing to experiment with potential opportunities through things like joining clubs, making connections with professors and TAs, looking at student-only employment and volunteer options — like here at the Press — and studying what unique programs and courses the university has to offer.
Another piece of advice related to having a productive mindset about university is don’t waste your electives on so-called “bird courses” for easy high marks. Instead, look for courses that seem genuinely interesting to you for electives. Even if courses that interest you prove to be harder than a bird course, curiosity is a far better motivator than boring ease.
I’d wager that the student who chooses electives that excite them will end with as high a grade as if they had selected courses that they heard were easy. Even if this isn’t the case, there’s still more to gain from doing an elective that interests you, as you will probably remember the information instead of just regurgitating it for the sake of a mark. This could mean an elective you choose because you’re interested in it has a higher chance compared to a bird course to open up new pathways for what you want to do both in university and post-graduation.
Next, for those in programs that require lots of readings and analytic seminars based on readings, do the entire reading. I would even recommend doing a required reading twice if you have the time. Being able to follow the reading material of a course closely each week means less cramming come exam time as the information will have soaked in each week. Furthermore, when you have a good grasp of the readings for a course, seminars can be much more fruitful experiences.
While on the topic of course requirements, I can’t stress enough how important attending lectures are.
It sounds rather obvious, but the amount of lecture skipping I’ve seen in university is shocking. To be fair, this is not always the students’ fault as some professors got used to reuploading lectures they recorded from the COVID-19 period instead of conducting a new lecture each week, making it less desirable to attend lectures because they lack a lively contemporaneity.
But still, in cases where there are in-person lectures, remember that your professor is an expert in their field. While not every professor is a talented lecturer — some just go through the movements unfortunately — disciplining yourself by attending a boring professor’s lectures has knock-on effects in terms of learning to stick to a schedule and avoiding the habit of procrastination.
Boring lectures aside, remember that a professor being able to guide you through a subject using their expertise is largely what you’re paying for. Therefore, it’s wise to treat lectures as the pilgrimage sites of your university education.
While many of these pieces of advice may seem like cliches given that a lot of them, no doubt, have been constantly recited to you by parents, high school advisors and so on — their apparent simplicity betrays their absolute essentiality in making these next three or more years some of the most significant in your life.