EduGuide asked professors at Michigan’s AlbionCollege for the inside scoop on success. When asked the question, “What makes a student successful in your classes?” professors from a range of academic disciplines offered up wise and helpful advice that every college freshman should read – and follow!
Here, Dr. Jessica Roberts shares her thoughts on what it really takes to get the most from your college education.
Students Need Skills
Success in the college classroom is, I believe, a matter of possessing certain skills and understanding education in particular ways.
Practically speaking, the students who succeed in my classes have a solid grasp of the basic principles of composition. They understand what an essay is, how to develop an idea, how to use textual analysis in order to support that idea, and how to craft sentences effectively. Students, then, hone these skills in the college classroom, learning, for instance, how to conceive of and then build increasingly sophisticated ideas.
Successful students also understand that reading is not simply a matter of “dross skimming” but rather an interactive process that requires them to engage meaningfullywith the material, to question and challenge it. The most successful students also understand reading and writing as skills they are continuing to develop.
College Is Different Than High School
Along those lines, the students who succeed in my classes understand that there is a difference between high school and college, even if they are not entirely sure what that difference is when they arrive. What they learned in high school may prepare them for the intellectual challenges they face in college but only if they are willing to think critically about and move beyond much of what they learned.
I see this most plainly in my students’ writing.
Many incoming college students have been (relentlessly) trained in the five-paragraph essay. As I understand it, the five paragraph essay is meant to teach students certain principles of writing — namely, that ideas have components and that writers should provide evidence to support and elaborate those ideas. As a form of writing, though, it tends to preclude complexity and creativity, both of which, to my mind, are vital to college-level thinking and writing.
Rather than resent that the type of writing that may have yielded A’s in high school no longer does so, successful students build off of the skills they learned in high school in order to become increasingly sophisticated writers and thinkers.
College Is A Process That Prepares You For Life
Above all, I think students who succeed in college think of the Bachelor of Arts not as a credential but as evidence that a person has begun a certain process of inquiry.
These students tend not to insist that classes provide some “practical” set of skills that are immediately and visibly applicable in their future professional lives. Instead, they understand that what they do in the classroom is develop habits of thought and ways of thinking that will enable them not simply to pursue and succeed in the career of their choice but also to live in the world as deliberate and critically minded citizens.
Successful students entertain the possibility that reading, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson might, in fact, make them a better doctor or lawyer or artist or banker because grappling with his prose requires an intellectual rigor and nimble-mindedness that any profession requires; what is more, they are willing to imagine that reading Emerson might be able to help us better understand the complicated and compelling business of being alive in the world.
Jessica Roberts has a Ph.D from the University of Michigan. She is Assistant Professor of English at Albion College in Albion, Michigan.