College Success Skills

College Terms/Glossary:

It's always good to know what to expect when walking onto campus; here's a few terms you may need to look out for during orientation and on your first day.

Credits: A measure of a class’s time based on how many hours students spend in class, but specific numbers largely depend on the institution.

Electives: Classes students choose to fulfill a general education requirement or just because they’re interested in a topic outside of their major’s core courses.

Internship vs. externship: Both are experience building opportunities for students and the terms are often used interchangeably. That said, internships can take the form of paid opportunities to work in their fields in a low-level role for an employer. Externships typically aren’t paid, are shorter and are often a form of job shadowing. For example, student nurses complete clinical externships under the supervision of established nurses.

Minor: A secondary focus meant to add to the value to the student’s major. A minor consists of the lower-level courses required for a major in the same discipline. For example a Business major with a minor in Spanish will be required to complete a certain number of lower-level Spanish courses—which are typically the same lower-level Spanish courses as those pursuing it as a major.

Registrar: A specialist tasked with handling several administrative and logistical areas of academia. The registrar’s office is responsible for many administrative academic duties like registering students for classes, preparing student transcripts, preparing class schedules and analyzing enrollment statistics.

Withdraw: To drop a class after the add/drop grace period. Withdrawing often means receiving a W on your transcript.

Study Skills:

Read to Yourself Out Loud: Some people memorize best through sound. If you identify yourself as one of them, try reading your course materials to yourself out loud. You can read to yourself out loud at home, and you can also record yourself. Then, take the recording and listen to it in the car or the train. Sometimes you need to hear things more than once, to fully remember or understand them.

Study With A Partner: Studying with someone you know can be helpful because there’s a lot you can do to make studying less boring: Gamifying the study session, you can quiz each other, etc.

Note Taking Skills:

Review After Class: Whenever possible, review your notes within a few hours to edit and expand on the notes that you took in class. This is to make sure you actually retain the information and not just passively listening and writing.

Stay Organized: Keeping your notes and work unorganized can be detrimental to your college experience! If you don’t know where your notes are, you won’t be able to actually study and you’ll see yourself cramming in order to try and do well.