Career Options Magazine

High school will be over before you know it, and soon it will be time to move on to bigger, more challenging things. It’s rather scary to think about your first year of post-secondary classes, but if you’re prepared for the big changes that come in college or university, you will have no trouble succeeding.

In the world of post-secondary education there is no such thing as detention; professors rarely give you a hard time if you receive a poor grade or fail to submit an assignment on time. Finishing your assignments is entirely up to you, and there will be absolutely no one checking up on you to make sure you’re getting your work done. While the lack of supervision is enjoyable in many ways—you certainly feel more like an adult when no one’s looking over your shoulder—it also means that you have a greater responsibility to manage your study time and keep track of due dates.

Rather than handing in bite-sized assignments every day, you will have major assignments every few weeks, and these will be worth very large chunks of your grade. This means that missing an assignment will no longer be a minor setback—ignoring a paper that is worth 20 or 25 percent of your grade will seriously impact your mark at the end of the semester. Handing things in late is also a bad idea because you’ll lose marks for every extra day you take to complete it.

While skipping class may not seem like a big deal, it can still be quite risky. As I hinted earlier, you won’t get detention for missing class; the only punishment you’ll receive is a lower participation grade, which is usually worth at least 10 percent of your overall grade. Some professors determine the participation grade by passing around a sign-in sheet at the end of class, and others will surprise you with in-class writing assignments to confirm that you were present for the lecture. More importantly, though, university department heads will schedule only one or two lectures a week, so missing one class could mean missing out on a whole week’s worth of material. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself very far behind in a very short span of time.

There are several habits you could start putting into effect right now in order to prepare yourself for post-secondary life:

• Set an alarm and wake up on your own instead of relying on your parents to wake you.
• Complete all of your assignments, even the ones that seem like trivial exercises.
• Practice making a budget for school supplies, textbooks and food, even if all of those things are currently supplied by mom and dad.
• Abandon the “hamburger” essay format consisting of an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion. This format might work in high school, but in college or university it just isn’t good enough. There’s nothing wrong with focusing on three or four main points in an essay, but proper development of your argument requires a more tactical approach than stuffing everything into three overlong body paragraphs.

When your post-secondary classes start in September, there are a few things you should remember. First, your course syllabus will be your best friend—it tells you everything from what textbooks to buy to when your major assignments are due. Read it over carefully as soon as you get it. Next, you need to be prepared to deal with distractions if you choose to live on campus; noise-cancelling headphones will tune out conversations and help you focus on your course work when your housemates have guests over. There will inevitably be nights when you need to lock yourself in your room to study for several hours at a time, and you will sometimes have to choose between going to a party and staying in to finish an essay. In regards to this, I offer the following advice: Don’t give in to temptation when your Grade Point Average is on the line! It costs a sizeable chunk of change to attend post-secondary classes, so don’t let your time and money go to waste.

Daniel McDonald is a freelance writer and blogger for Career Options.

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