<p>It depends on what stresses you out.</p>
<p>In high school, you have every class every day and feel like you need to do work for each class every night. All kinds of little assignments. Everything collected, everything graded. Lots and lots of little things, and you stress to do all of them, because they all add up and every little point might count. And you chase every extra credit point. And everyone is in your business and knows who the “good students” are…</p>
<p>Also, in high school, you are generally called on to learn the material through memorization. In college, it is assumed that you can memorize–and very few exams will ask you to regurgitate what you have read. In college you will be asked to apply what you have learned to demonstrate understanding.</p>
<p>Which leads to one more big difference: in college, a lot of the times your readings and lectures may seem to have nothing to do with one another. In other words, the professor does not assign a reading and then go over the material you read in class. The reading may be a jumping off point for the lecture, or a different viewpoint than that given in the lecture, or just be additional information or totally different information than covered in the lecture. But you can be sure that both the readings and the lectures will be covered on the exam. And if the reading confuses you, you are expected to get help…from a classmate, or the TA, or the tutoring office, or the professor during office hours…and no one will be checking to see if you understand everything, that’s also up to you. One more thing: in my sons’ classes, many times part of the course work was to make either a group or individual presentation. These presentations could be an important part of the grade–and the information presented by students also often appeared on the end of semester exams.</p>
<p>Most college classes meet only two or three times a week; many meet only once. The professor posts a syllabus at the beginning of the course and will never refer to it again. It’s up to you to pay attention to it. The professor often will not even mention due dates for papers or exam dates. Readings and any assignments are listed in the syllabus, as well as what format the professor expects for turning them in. Many assignments are turned in electronically; the electronic acceptance box may be programmed to close automatically immediately when assignments are due–so late work not accepted, and don’t plead a glitch as an excuse. You won’t have lots of little assignments eating up your time and effort for minimal return, which is great; the flip side is that you can’t garner lots of points from easy sources to cushion less than excellent performance on an exam or assignment. And extra credit will no longer exist.</p>
<p>The good things about the college arrangement: </p>
<p>You decide when and how to do the work. For example, one of my sons found that for certain courses, he learned material better by reading several chapters at once, rather than one chapter at a time, because he could see more of the “structure” better–so he devoted one day each weekend to reading for that kind of class, rather than reading a chapter before the lecture for each day that week.</p>
<p>You can calendar all of your syllabi and at a glance can see what your workload will be at various times, so that you won’t have any surprises. Because you will be able to see upcoming bottlenecks, you can plan your work and work your plan. You will know that if you have a paper or project due at the time of an exam, that you might want to get the paper out of the way early so that you have plenty of time to study for the exam.</p>
<p>Also, you can often view syllabi on line before signing up for a course. If a course has several sections, you can often review the syllabi and pick the section that best plays to your strengths. For example, some people hate writing papers, so they can choose the section that might have more exams, less papers; some might choose or avoid sections with various sorts of projects or oral presentations; more personally, one of my sons tends to do poorly on exams, so he would choose sections where exam grades were weighted the least against papers and projects. </p>
<p>What my sons found worked for them was to spend some time every weekend mapping out the planned workload for the next week or two --what times on what days were they planning to do what work ( for example. planning to do calc problem sets from 2-5 on Mondays, language lab from 7-9; read for lingusitics 10-12 on Tuesday, research for global health paper 3-5; do all econ reading on Sunday, etc.) They also calendared their fun activities to make sure they worked them in. The good thing about their method is that if something came up, they could consult their calendar and see if they could fit it in. If their calendar was clear, all was good; or they could see if there was a way they could shift something around to make it work’ if not, they knew they had to say no that time.</p>
<p>This technique really took the stress away, because they felt more in control of their time and their workload. They could take time to have fun without feeling guilty, and really enjoy themselves, because they knew Job#1 was being well taken care of. Their calendars were not graven in stone, they could be adjusted, it’s just that the boys knew that if they couldn’t find an adjustment that worked, well, then, it couldn’t be adjusted.</p>