<p>i was wondering, do any of you have any advice for new students? Anything you wished you had known before you enrolled?</p>
<p>would anyone like to reply?</p>
<p>I wish that I would have known that college is so hard. Its not like high school where you can do a lot of stuff and do fine in your classes. you have to work damn hard in college just to have a b average.</p>
<p>My daughter actually finds it less stressful than high school in some ways. Yes, you have to work hard, but with good study skills and good time management you find lots of time for fun, sports, hanging out also.</p>
<p>Bring rubber rain boots and a few umbrellas.</p>
<p>My D is an athlete with a work-study job trying to study engineering and she would definitely agree with jjjjj - she would be overjoyed with B grades at Rice. A grades while doing it all in high school was the norm for her and this difficulty has been a bit of a surprise that she wishes she had anticipated.</p>
<p>i'd have to agree with everyone else. i work my butt off for a B over here. Rice isn't a creampuff school by reputation, and we don't have any of that grade inflation crap either.</p>
<p>i was overambitious back then and wanted to dbl-major in two things i was interested in. but being a bioengineer doesnt help at all. i like bioe and all, but i spent too long trying to chase a dbl major that i knew i'd kill myself attempting to pull off (not literally).</p>
<p>my advice is to be as flexible as possible in your course choices. a major is something you must do; that does not mean you should think about college in terms of your major or the rest of your life. the purpose is to get as much learning done in the small amount of time you have. let most of your learning be done on your own. be curious and challenge assumptions. maximize your learning according to any factors you see fit: how you learn best, when you learn best, workload, professors, friends. </p>
<p>if you choose a major simply because you find that the major has good professors, that is perfectly fine. if you feel you are not learning much, let go quickly. do not resist because you like the field in the abstract, or you want to live up to expectations that aren't your own, or you want opportunities you think you wouldn't otherwise have. some people are more rigid about the last point. i have seen too many examples in the real world, e.g. a computer science PROFESSOR at yale got his phd in classical hebrew literature and did his programming on his own. be the one that people point to and say, "yeah, that's possible." </p>
<p>everyone knows a major is a very imprecise way of gauging interest or courseload. your transcript would be a better measure, but we unfortunately don't have a word to describe those precisely. on top of that, the ultimate measure is how much you get out of each class. no one will understand your learning experience like you do, so do not settle with a pleasant faulty measure at the cost of actual learning. i know a stat major who hates the four stat courses he is taking, and he says he is learning the most in art history 102, which he is pass/failing no less so is under little pressure to try! </p>
<p>learn a foreign language. study abroad in that language. if you can't do this, study abroad in english somewhere. </p>
<p>don't double major.</p>