Over the past semester, I have learned several different important strategies for surviving the college life that was not needed in high school and vice versa. The reason for is that I am currently a freshman in college, so I can remember the difference between the two different learning environments very clearly.  These differences are pretty much varied and there are only so many that can be explained.

One of those things is the amount of time spent doing work for school. Now, this is varied on how many classes one takes in college, but in High school it depended on what classes you take and that is it. Now, the reason that it was a hard time for me to transition into this is because I was in regular classes needed for the advanced diploma at my school and then when I got over here to Old Dominion University, the workload, even for one-hundred level classes was and still is more than was over in public school.

One the other things that have changed in the transition over here is the study time because the classes require more thought and the teachers no longer treat the students like minors. The way to prepare oneself for this change and to keep up with it is to take the best notes one could have have ever taken without writing too much, study for up to two hours per night on everything one could have learned in each class so far, and manage time away from classes a lot better than a person might have done in high school. What I did for this is study for two or three hours on the subjects I am currently taking and my notes are written in a way where I can understand the content and it is almost if not all there, while in high school, I barely took nearly enough notes, thinking that I could remember it all and my time management was so non-existent that I was playing video games almost all the time that I sometimes forgot homework, although I would try to do the homework in class the day it was assigned. In college I learned that taking time to do the homework is much better than rushing through it and making so many mistakes that the teacher looks at the student with disappointment.

Here I am, rambling about my life in the world of public education, when I could be talking about something more important. Something like how I will continue to change in the next few months. I will try to get all of my textbooks and keep track of them since last semester i had a hard time remembering to put in the access code for one of my classes. I am almost done rambling again but there is something that I need to get off of my chest. In order to succeed, one must always pay attention in class.