Things I Wish I Would Have Done Through College [College Life Tips]

I am by no means a professional in the subject of college, but I’ve gone through it and I feel that I have some valuable insights which freshman may want to hear about. I’ll try to think of more (and maybe something will come up in the comments) but in the meantime, here are the biggies:

• Take a general studies course earlier to teach me how to take tests, study textbooks, live efficiently, concentrate better, memorize better, and manage my time.
  • I lived in a crisis mode until I took some of these classes late in my Junior year. It would have helped out so much more to take these classes early in my Freshman year so that I could apply them throughout college.
• Keep a copy of everything in a PDF format.

• PDFCreator is a program that will allow you to “print” to PDF. Anything that you would print out of a printer can be printed to PDF. This way, formatting will always be intact (unlike going from version to version of word processing applications).

• Meaning, I wish I would have kept an organized portfolio with all of my important course work and major projects in a digital format. This portfolio will land you that all important internship and/or career.
• Keeping this perspective also includes remembering all of the details of past projects so you can bring them up at an interview down the road.

• For example, if you put “Feedback Control” on your resume as a key course, you’d better be able to answer the question “Can you explain to me in detail what a PID Controller is and how it works?”.

• This is an important thing to do. The professors get to know you very well (believe it or not) and they can help you prepare for a career and offer plenty of advise. Most have ties into the real working world, so they are another valuable resource in which you can network with to get that perfect job.

• A folder layout like this would’ve been great to keep from day one:

College Documents
   + 2005
   + 2006
   - 2007
      + Summer
      - Fall
         + ENG315 - Writing
         + MATH212 - Calculus
         + SCI233 - Physics
         - COMPE324 - Digital Design
            + Lab Handouts
            - Lab Write-Ups
               + Lab01 - Gate Logic
               - Lab02 - Counters
                  * Lab02_Counters_Lab.pdf
                  * Lab02_Counters_Lab.tex

• I think it’s important to note that I gave everything a meaningful name. Sometimes you forget exactly what GS104 is and more often you forget what “Lab 05″ was about. So give a meaningful name so when you go back to look at it (or search for a document) you’ll know where it is.

• I know this sounds impossible, but it’s do-able and it’s worth it. The way I see it is I just spent $20,000 on an education, the least I can do is spend $1.50 to buy a new binder every semester and keep the old binder with all documents from the last semester in. I would’ve been nice to keep a consistent binder size as well so they stack into a box easier later on for archiving. You paid for the material in those binders (and books).

• There’s a very handy feature of a gmail account (it may apply for others) — you can fetch mail from any email account. If your university or college is anything like mine, they give you a very limited amount of email storage (maybe 25MB). This means that you’re not going to be able to keep all of your messages throughout your education. What I find most valuable are the email attachments which included collaborative assignments or otherwise. Gmail has 7GB worth (at least today it does, it keeps growing everyday) which is enough to store very well every single email you ever received or sent to yourself.

So, there you have it. My list of things I wish I would have done or would have done sooner in college. I hope this can help somebody out there get ready for school and maybe it helps you think about some things that you would’ve otherwise not thought of. Let me know if you have anything to add in the comments!

Feel free to buy me a soda if this post prevented any headaches! Another way to show your appreciation is to take a gander at these relative ads that I hope you'll be interested in:

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