Seven tips for making your first year of college a success

The first semester of college is just one new thing after another. It’s challenging, exciting, and sometimes a little scary. As a professor who’s taught hundreds of firstyear students, I'd like to offer seven tips to get your first year of college off to a good start.

3. Forge good relationships with professors

You think we don’t see you staring at your lap to text, but we do. There is nothing you can do to make a professor loathe you faster than using social media during class. You are also wasting the hard-earned money it took to put you in that classroom. On that note, make your social media settings private. Don't post anything you wouldn't want a professor (or employer) to see, starting now.

When you write an email to us, write formally. Start with ”Dear Professor X.” Sign with a proper closing such as “Best.” You’ll be noticed for your good manners and professionalism.

Go to office hours. We have set times we are in our offices, waiting to talk to you. Stop by early in the semester with a question and introduce yourself. Some good ones are: “What is the best way to approach the reading assignments?” or “Can I discuss a possible paper topic with you?” or, “I really didn’t understand what you said in class about Marx’s theory of use-value. Could you explain?”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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