If you’ve never been in charge of your own finances before now, be careful with that. Getting a credit card can help you establish a credit history, which is important- not many people live without credit cards, car loans, or mortgages, and those things can all be hard to get later on if you don’t have a credit history. (I know some people who can’t get credit cards as adults, and their lives are more difficult than most people’s in 10,000 little ways.) But be careful- pay off your credit card(s) every month if at all possible. Remember that small purchases add up. People who get into trouble with credit card debt don’t all do it by buying big-ticket items. Things like eating at a restaurant instead of the dining hall for lunch every day add up over time.
Also, don’t assume that anyone who is a professor is automatically a better teacher than a grad student or instructor. A lot of people think this, but they’re wrong. The criteria for hiring professors at many universities have almost nothing to do with teaching ability. You’ll have professors who are great teachers and professors who are terrible teachers, as well as grad student teaching assistants who are both.
They will indeed make fun of you. You’re legally an adult, or almost so. College is a good time to start acting like it. That means not begging your parents to help you deal with the mean, bad professor or awful roommate. The first person to talk to about a problem with a professor (after talking to the professor him- or herself, of course) is your academic advisor or someone in the department in which that professor works (a department secretary can help you find the right person), or a more advanced student majoring in that subject (especially if you are having problems in a class in your major). The first person to talk to about a roommate problem (after the roommate) is your dorm’s Resident Advisor or Resident Assistant (RA).
Acting like an adult also means not trying to get special treatment in class (unless you really do have a disability) or whining about a grade you deserved. If you slack off in class and don’t do the homework, then come whining to the professor about how you need a B in this class or you’ll lose your scholarship, odds are very good that the professor (or TA) won’t care. If you don’t care about their class, why should they care about your GPA? Challenge a grade if and only if you have had a real emergency or problem, or the grading was not done as the syllabus said it would be.
If you’re feeling depressed or stressed-out, the student health center can help you. Nobody with any sense thinks these days that those things are due to a character weakness or aren’t a “real” problem. And having sought help for depression or anxiety will be absolutely necessary to making your case if you have to ask professors or the university for any sort of special treatment you might need because of those problems.
Oh, and if you’re 18 or older, the student health center legally can’t tell your parents (or anybody else) if you’ve come in for a problem, or what that problem was, just in case you find yourself with a potentially embarrassing problem (such as needing tests for things like pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections). ivylass seems pretty level-headed, so Ivyboy89 shouldn’t have this problem, but not all of us are blessed with cool Dopers for parents…
This is good advice, and not just about class times. Play to your strengths, and try to work around your weaknesses, rather than forcing yourself to work on them. If you’re not good at organizing a looseleaf binder, for example, use a spiral notebook or take notes on your laptop, rather than trying to force yourself to keep a binder organized. Here’s a secret of the Real World that they don’t tell you in school- in most cases, there are lots of ways to do something that lead to the same result, and there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t pick the one that is easiest for you.
In my case, I’m hopeless at keeping papers organized. My solution to this is to keep the important stuff on the computer if possible. This means that I couldn’t have hacked it in the pre-computer age, but guess what- unless the laws of physics are rather different than we now think they are, I’m never going to have to keep papers organized in the pre-computer age. So it’s a better use of my time to develop other skills and live with the fact that I can’t keep papers organized.
Another example: if you’re not very good at doing arithmetic quickly in your head, try to take classes where professors offer partial credit or let you use calculators. The chances that you’re going to have to do something like design a bridge without computers or calculators are rather slim these days. Calculating quickly in your head is a nice skill to have, I’m sure, but you can get through life without it, and even get a degree in math without it.
Nobody’s good at everything. My mom, who can do calculations quickly in her head, is hopeless if anything out-of-the-ordinary happens with her computer. Don’t beat yourself up over skills you don’t have. It’s better to get better at your strengths than to spend all your time working on your weaknesses.
