<p>Dear CCers,</p>
<p>College will be coming right around the corner as I am a senior. I'm not a genius like some on here. Above average grades and all-around good student. No 4.0 or 1500 Sat. I was just wondering how different college is from high-school and what kind of preparations I should take to succeed in college.</p>
<p>Btw if im looking into grad school is gpa a big factor?
What if i wasnt?</p>
<p>for grad school there are minimum requrements. and most of the requirements are like 3.0 gpa.</p>
<p>There's a book every college should read about studying. It's called What Smart Students Know by Adam Robinson, written by one of the founders of the test prep service Princeton Review. I have never seen a better explanation of the steps you need to follow to really <em>learn</em> the material, and if you've learned it well you will have no trouble with grades. You'll probably be kicking yourself that if you'd known this stuff earlier you could have done better in HS!</p>
<p>The biggest 2 shifts from HS to college are in the level of challenge and in self-motivation. At college the expectations are going to be raised about how quickly you can learn the material and how much can be covered, higher of course at some colleges than at others. And you won't have a HS teacher looking over your shoulder and giving weekly quizes and so on to make sure you're doing the work. If you don't keep up with the material they have no problems giving you an F, so you need to become self-motivated to stay up with the class material.</p>
<p>What Smart Students Know by Adam Robinson</p>
<p>Though a great book, it's very, very time-consuming.</p>
<p>It's hard for a lot of people the first semester to go from a HS where there are lots of quizzes, worksheets, assignments, etc. to a class where you will maybe have two exams and two papers, and that's it. You have to have motivation and discipline to keep up with readings, go to office hours when you don't understand something (rather than wait til right before an exam), and study material some even when you don't have anything graded soon... in some ways it's less work, in some ways more - but either way it's just different</p>
<p>College was a big shock to me. When I graduated from high school I had a 4.2 GPA. After two years of college I had a 2.0. I had a lot of trouble understanding the engineering and computer science material. I was pretty much clueless most of the time. I transfered to a different school and started over with mechanical engineering. I have a 3.5 today (it's been three semesters since the transfer). I didn't have any problems keeping up with the work, even though there was a lot more to do than in high school. For me it was comprehending the material. I never had such a hard time understanding something. But eventually everything clicked and it should be a fairly smooth ride to graduation.</p>
<p>College is so much easier than high school in my opinion. The high school environment is so much not conducive (sp?) to learning. High school was all about trying to look cool, playing the stupid games with dress codes, blah blah blah. In college you only go to about have the class time and learn twice as much because its not in a repressive environment. I had like a 2.4 in HS and a 2.8 in college.</p>