If you, dear reader, are a young person looking forward to
entering college this fall, I hope the months and years ahead will
prove both beneficial and enjoyable. The chances of the latter’s
fulfillment are probably greater than the former. The intention
here is to offer some advice for the proto-freshman:
Probably you will be required to live in a college-owned
dormitory. How else can the place be amortized? Avoid — however
appealing it may seem — living in a “co-ed” dormitory where the
sexes are intermixed, in more ways than one. Also shun the “open”
dormitory where members of the opposite sex are free to roam at any
time. These are not really safe, and it is rather difficult to
concentrate on cell division or the various forms of avoir
when persons nearby are rutting.
The first important question a freshman must usually answer is,
“What is your major?” Obviously this decision can have life-long
ramifications, but — relax — it usually does not. A minority of
alumni are today working in exactly the field they thought
they would be preparing for when they entered college. Many a
would-be engineer has been shunted into new channels by a required
course in organic chemistry or calculus, which can approximate the
impact of a railroad locomotive. The high school courses where you
got your best grades and which you enjoyed the most will likely be
a reliable starting place. But be warned that high school and
college courses vary greatly in the breadth and depth with which
material is covered and, most of all, in the speed of that
coverage.
This leads to a question probably lurking in the back of your
mind: How much will I have to work in college? Answer: a lot! Even
noted party schools have professors who understand that students
learn little of value in easy courses. Such courses travel under a
variety of nicknames: snap, pipe, gut, blow-off, and probably newer
terms because imaginative students regularly change the
nomenclature. But there are exceptions. I once took a course in art
appreciation (with several football players as classmates), but my
valuation of that course reached its peak 30 years later when I
stood in the Medici Chapel in Florence, Italy, and saw statuary
previously only seen in pictures.
There are two standard expectations of your workload at college.
The one long used says, “Spend two hours studying for every hour
spent in a classroom or laboratory.” There may be a student who
actually met such a standard, but if so he is probably stuffed and
in a museum somewhere. More realistically, just remember that you
are a professional student and your salary is the payment of your
living costs and college fees. So try to work a 40-hour week, with
class time and studying. This may seem an easy goal but with all
the diversions a college campus affords, you will do well to meet
it.
This advice assumes you are not one of those lucky individuals
who read at a thousand-words-a-minute speed, with a photographic
memory. Such a fellow-student once said, when he saw me pouring
over a history book, “You don’t need to do all that. Just wait
until the night before an exam, then read all the material
assigned, and that’ll be enough.” It was not. My experiment with
that procedure was brief.
A 19th-century educator, Mark Hopkins if memory serves, once
said that if he were founding a college with only limited funds, he
would first build a dormitory, assuming that students would learn a
great deal simply from each other. He was probably right, but I
shudder to think of some of the learning that would result from
such a “curriculum.” He added that if he had more money he would
build a library and buy books. Only if he had yet more money would
he build classrooms and hire a faculty. Well, the college library
is probably your main piece of learning equipment. Quickly find
where it is located and how to use it. A library is one place on
campus where you can rely on having needed peace and quiet for
study.
What about Mr. Mark Hopkins’ valuation of your fellow students?
I am not going to tell you how to make friends in college, but if
you can arrange to room with an upper-classman, by all means do so.
I shall never forget as a freshman asking my senior roommate how to
spell a word, and, without looking up from his reading, he reached
for his dictionary and threw it in my direction. Juniors are ideal.
I once asked my older brother, then in college, “Freshmen are
green, sophomores are goofy, seniors are looking ahead to life
after college. What characteristics do juniors have?” He answered,
“They just work like hell.”
In general, try to make friends with students who are smarter
than you are. They tend to be more interesting than slower
students, serve as good models and are often helpful. If you are
interested in joining a fraternity or sorority, fine, but do not be
afraid to ask about costs, all costs, and ask how the
organization’s members’ grades rank in comparison with their peers
and the all-university grade average. If they will not tell you,
the dean of students’ office will.
Now we come to the big question, what classes shall you take? At
least one and perhaps two classes will be required of all freshmen,
which means most freshmen will make three selections, which may not
be easy. The institution that supplied me with paychecks for four
decades has, by my count, 240 departments. If each of these
departments offers five courses — a conservative estimate — that
means more than 1,200 separate courses are available. You will
probably not be interested in “Middle English Literature” or
“Biochemistry and Molecular Biology,” at least for a while, and
probably will be eligible for no more than 20 percent of the
offerings. A faculty member or adviser may be on hand to assist
you, but the final responsibility for the selections will be
yours.
In course selection let me offer a very loose suggestion: prefer
the course covering a definite subject area to the broad, the
general, the vague. Avoid all courses with “Studies” in the title
or description. Why? Which do you suppose will give you a solid,
coherent body of knowledge, a course entitled “Botany 101,” or
“Botanical Studies”? The latter is likely a wide selection of the
instructor’s favorite readings. This is especially true if the
subject area allows his or her political prejudices to come into
play, for you then may be sure of an unbroken diet of far left-wing
readings calculated to make you a life-long Democrat voter. For
much the same reason, be cautious in choosing courses with
“Readings In …” in the title. Such a course may be excellent for
a senior majoring in the field but probably not for beginning
student.
College professors are not meticulous in naming courses. The
names chosen are, simply, advertising. An example is “political
science.” Politics is about as scientific as witchcraft. Also,
pause thoughtfully when weighing a course that begins with
“socio-,” as in sociology, social science, social psychology,
social work, etc. The word points to the behavior of people and, as
you can easily observe, human beings and their behavior are pretty
hard to pin down with any exactitude.
Now for what may be the most valuable advice here given. If an
aunt should happen to ask what you would like as a high school
graduation present, perhaps the best answer you can give is, “a
good collegiate dictionary!” In any case, be sure you have one, for
it contains within its covers most of what you do not know. During
your four years of college you will probably learn the meanings of
more new words than during any other four-year span of your life,
though the learning process may continue for the rest of your life.
In almost every course you study, the core of the material can be
reduced to a vocabulary list of technical or conceptual words.
Learn the meanings and applications of those words and you will be
on top of the course.
Now let me add a final caution and encouragement. The freshman
year is often the most difficult for the reason that we learn
things in context, and freshmen do not have much academic context.
The more you know about a subject the easier it is to learn more
about that subject. You will, especially during your first two
years, be building several contexts. And you will soon concede — I
sincerely hope — that the time and effort you in-vest in learning
are absolutely worth the cost. Best of all, you may discover a
lifetime’s sheer enjoyment of learning things you did not
previously know.
Theodore R. Kennedy is Professor emeritus at Michigan
State University.
