COL 103 - Chapter 1

WELCOME TO YOUR COLLEGE EXPERIENCE

Congratulations - you are going to college! You’ve joined about two million other students who are starting college this year. No matter your age, background, academic skills, or economic circumstances, you can succeed if you have the motivation, commitment and willingness to take advantage of all that your college or university has to offer. You may find that the college experience is even transformative.

Access your Strengths

Think about the topic of this chapter. What do you think it means to thrive in college? Do you have a clear sense of your own purpose? What personal and career goals do you want to pursue during and after college? Can you describe the experiences you have had with setting goals and reaching them? If you are not quite ready to answer these questions, think about them as you read through this chapter.

Set Goals

Think about a challenge you have had in making academic decisions or setting personal goals. As you read this chapter, set a goal that relates to some of the chapter material, and be prepared to talk with others in your class about why you selected this goal. For example, you might set a goal to understand the research on the value of a college degree and apply it to your own personal goals for your future.

What do you mean by “transformative”? For most college students, completing a degree will have a profound influence on their employment opportunities and income over a lifetime. But far beyond that, college can have an impact on how you think about and understand the world around you, whom you select as friends and associates, whom you may commit to or marry, how you raise children if you choose to have them, how you vote and worship, how you spend your spare time - and a long list of other lifetime outcomes. So what you have chosen to do right now is really exciting and holds potential for you. It can be a lot of fun and very satisfying, but it can also be a lot of work. This course, this instructor, your fellow students, and this textbook are going to your companions and partners in launching you toward success in your college experience. Who are we to be telling you all this? Well, if you Google us you will see that we have many years of experience in helping students be successful. But, as we wrote in the preface to this book, we were once just like you - first year students trying to overcome our own challenges and struggles.

Thriving in College

As authors of this textbook, our overreaching goal for you is that you not only be “successful” in college and life but that you thrive in both. Thriving is about achieving the goals you initially set for yourself and other goals you can’t yet imagine. Thriving means going beyond minimum requirements to meet and exceed those goals, and it includes discovering talents and abilities you didn’t know you had. Thriving is about achieving your highest possible level of performance and deriving a maximum amount of self-satisfaction, self-esteem, and pleasure. Thriving is about peak performance - it involves excitement, exhilaration, and even joy.

The college years are a unique period and set of experiences in life when you will be surrounded by some of the smartest and most supportive people you will ever meet. They will help you thrive so that you become the person you want to be! So hang on for the exciting ride that is beginning right now.

Making the Most of the College Success Course and This Textbook

This course is known by several names, including not only college success but also University 101, College 101, first-year seminar, or first year colloquium. No matter what your course is called, you’ve acquired a textbook - as you’ve done for most of the other courses you are taking this term. You will also have a syllabus that includes many components as described in Table 1.1. You are probably asking, “What is the point of this course, and why do I need this textbook?”

What all college success courses have in common is that they introduce you, a new, transferring, returning college student, to a central topic: how to be a successful student in college and successful in life. Currently, the course and this text are based on extensive research in a field called “student success” that investigates what students need to know to thrive in college, why some students do a better job at making the most of their college experience, and the strategies and attitudes of the most successful students.

So what does research tell us? Here are the most important takeaways:

• Students who complete a college success course are more likely to continue in college and finish their degrees.

• These students not only know about where to get help; they actually seek out and utilize such help.

• Students who complete a college success course are more involved in organizations and activities, and they interact more often with faculty outside class.

• And perhaps most important, these students make better choices overall while they’re in college.

Table 1.1 > The Syllabus

The syllabus is the formal statement of course requirements. On the first day in all your courses, pay very close attention when your instructors review the syllabus. Each syllabus will be slightly different. Select a syllabus, either for this or another course. Then highlight or place a check-mark by these important components of the syllabus, and make some notes or add some details here about each area:

And why do you have a textbook in this course? Because your college or university wants you to have, in writing, instructions on how to “do college.” so to speak. As authors, we predict with great confidence that if you take the material in this book seriously, apply it to your own beginning college experience, and make your best good-faith effort to use its suggestions, then you will be successful in college - and in life.

While you attend class and when reading this textbook, you will get valuable advice that applies not only to your college success class but also to all your college courses this year and in the future. Think of this course as a kind of laboratory for what to do in all your college courses to be successful.