How to Get the Most Out of College
They’re privileged, pivotal years. Navigate them with as
much care as you did the path that got you there.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion Columnist
We overwhelm teenagers with advice
about choosing a college. Go big. Go small. Put prestige above cost. Do the
opposite.
We inundate them with tips for getting
in. Spend summers this way. Write essays that way. Play a niche sport. Play an
obscure instrument.
And then? We go mum, mustering less
urgency and fewer words for the subject of actually navigating the crucial
college years to best effect. It’s strange. And it’s stupid, because how a student goes
to school matters much, much more than where.
So
for several years — during visits to campuses, interviews with experts on
higher education and interactions with recent graduates — I’ve been gathering
wisdom along those lines.
My interest isn’t which types of
programs at which kinds of institutions yield the surest employment and highest
salaries. That information is already out there and
always changing. I also worry that it casts college as purely vocational and
plants the false notion that, at the age of 18, you know yourself well enough
to plot out the entirety of your professional life.
My
focus is on optimal ways to socialize, to prioritize, to pick up skills
integral to any career and to open up exciting opportunities both en route to a
degree and after you’ve acquired it. Not nearly enough of the roughly 20
million Americans who are beginning or resuming college over the coming weeks
pause, in their trepidation and exhilaration, to think about that.
Many don’t have the luxury: College for
them is a slapdash scramble to grab credits as they can while working a
demanding job, caring for family members or both. More than a third of the
students enrolled in higher education in this country attend two-year
institutions. Those at four-year institutions often don’t participate in the
romantic ideal of nurturing dormitories and verdant quadrangles. They live with
parents. They pray for parking.
But
others do have the freedom to tailor their time. They just neglect to take
advantage of it. My friend Eric Johnson, who provides guidance to
underprivileged students at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, put it to me this way: “The more you regard college as a
credentialing exercise, the less likely you are to get the benefits.”
Johnson is as thoughtful and insightful
about higher education as just about anyone I’ve come across. The wisest
students, he said, “move into a peer relationship with the institution rather
than a consumer relationship with it.” They seize leadership roles. They serve
as research assistants.
And
they build social capital, realizing that above all else, they’re in college
“to widen the circle of human beings who know you and care about you,” he
said. That’s perfectly put.
Many students, nervous about a new
environment, follow friends from high school or people whose demographic
backgrounds match their own into homogeneous cocoons. That can indeed provide
solace and support. But it’s also a wasted opportunity — educationally,
morally, strategically. Diversity opens you to an array and wealth of ideas,
and being comfortable with it is an asset in just about any workplace or
career. You can decide to establish that comfort in college.
But perhaps the most important
relationships to invest in are those with members of the school’s faculty. Most
students don’t fully get that. They’re not very good at identifying the
professors worth knowing — the ones who aren’t such academic rock stars that
they’re inaccessible, the ones with a track record of serious mentoring — and
then getting to know them well.
As part of my research, I collected
surveys from about 30 recipients of the prestigious Mitchell scholarship, a rough analogue
of the Rhodes that sends 12 recent American college graduates every year to
universities in Ireland to pursue master’s degrees. (I was on the panel of
judges who selected the winners from 2015 through 2017.) I asked them to
reflect on college and to rank, in order of importance, such activities and
dynamics as coursework, travel abroad, internships, relationships with
classmates, involvement in campus groups and reading done apart from any class
obligation.
Relationships
with faculty members was also an option, and it was the clear winner,
placed near the top by almost all of the scholars and at the top by
many, including Azza Cohen, a documentary filmmaker who graduated from
Princeton in 2016. To explain that ranking, she directed me to a 2014 essay of
hers for The Daily Princetonian that was titled “Empty Chairs.” It charted her
realization and regret that she and so many classmates skipped professors’
office hours and didn’t avail themselves of invaluable conversations and
counsel. “In the routine rush to finish our assignments, sometimes the breadth
of the surrounding intellectual force field slips our minds,” she wrote. She
was then a sophomore, and she mended her ways.
Reading
her essay, I was reminded of an interview I did several years ago with
Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, about her days at the
University of Denver. She said she liked to sign up for the front end of office
hours, because she wanted to catch professors when they weren’t feeling
depleted and watching the clock. She read up on professors beforehand and, if
their written work was accessible, familiarized herself with it, so she could
make mention of it. That flattered them and pegged her as a serious,
considerate person.
Taking that too far, of course, could
be repulsively obsequious. The correct calibration is everything. And it’s
worth acing, because a professor or administrator who takes a genuine interest
in you can be a bridge to other influential people inside and outside the
school, to limited-space seminars, to special collaborations, to exclusive
summer programs, to competitive internships, to graduate work and more.
Damian Walker saw that at U.N.C.-Chapel
Hill, from which he graduated last spring. “The most influential thing I did
here was find mentors,” he told me. And he found them largely by opening up to
them.
Walker attended U.N.C.-Chapel Hill as a
Carolina Covenant scholar, which means that his family was poor enough for him
to qualify for full financial aid. He told me that early on he went to an open
campus discussion about police violence against minorities. Several faculty
members were also there, and he approached Judith Cone, the vice chancellor for
innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development.
“I didn’t know who she was,” he
recalled. “Short lady. I shared my story about how police shootings affected my
life, my family. She gave me her business card and said, ‘Follow up.’ I still
have that business card to this day.” He went to see her in her office and kept
going to see her in her office, and with the encouragement and help of her and
other faculty members, he cobbled together the money to go to an educational
conference in Massachusetts, to meet with entrepreneurs in New York City and to
spend the summer between his junior and senior years interning for a company in
China. He’s about to head back to China to teach English for a while. He’s well
on his way to fluency in Mandarin, which he thinks will give him a definite
edge in any future business career.
Walker
is an example of what a mammoth study by
Gallup, Purdue University and the Strada Education Network has found.
Previously known as the Gallup-Purdue Index and now called the Strada-Gallup
Alumni Survey, it has questioned about 100,000 American college graduates of
all ages about their college experiences, looking for connections between how
they spent their time in college and how fulfilled they say they are now.
The study has not found that attending
a private college or a highly selective one foretells greater satisfaction.
Instead, the game changers include establishing a deep
connection with a mentor, taking on a sustained academic project and playing a
significant part in a campus organization. What all of these reflect are
engagement and commitment, which I’ve come to think of as overlapping muscles
that college can and must be used to build. They’re part of an assertive rather
than a passive disposition, and they’re key to professional success.
I’m
not saying that this is a cinch, nor am I ignoring the demons in the
way. Anxiety and depression are legion on campuses
today, holes that too many students fall into and never crawl out of. More than ever, students should be
on the lookout for them and take the necessary steps to mitigate them.
Be careful, especially at the beginning
of college, about spending too much time alone. Isolation can become its own
bad habit, and prying eyes can be the best insurance policy against destructive
behavior. Regulate time on social media, where discourse can be barbed and
peers curate honeyed alter egos that stoke insecurity in those looking at them.
Don’t drink too much and don’t shortchange sleep, as prosaic as that sounds. And work out in some
way.
“We know that exercise is very, very
important,” said Jan Collins-Eaglin, the associate dean for wellness at Pomona
College in Southern California. “It will calm you down.” She noted, too, that
many schools have invested in their mental health services but that many
students hesitate to use them. “Seeking help is not taboo,” she said. “If you
get over that, you are one step ahead of the game.”
One crossroads that students often get
needlessly worked up about is choosing a major. It’s less make-or-break than
you think. I hear that from a majority of thriving college graduates, and the
professors I speak with strongly caution students against wedding themselves to
a single field of study before being exposed to several of them. College’s
greatest gifts can be an introduction to a passion you didn’t previously have
and a pivot into an occupation you never before envisioned.
“You
have to ask yourself what lies closest to your heart,” said Jim Gates, a renowned theoretical physicist at Brown
University who previously taught at the University of Maryland and M.I.T. “If
you are fortunate enough to find something that you’re totally obsessed with,
you’re likely to work very hard at it. If you’re a human being of average
intelligence and you work very hard at something, you’re likely to become very
good at it. And if you become very good at it, people are likely to notice.”
That means they’re likely to employ and reward you as well.
Regardless of major, there are skills
to insist on acquiring because they transcend any particular career.
Communication — clear writing, cogent speaking — is one of them, and many
different courses can hone it.
Another
of those skills, frequently overlooked, is storytelling. It’s different from
communication: a next step. Every successful pitch for a new policy, new
product or new company is essentially a story, with a shape and logic intended
to stir its audience. So is every successful job interview. The best moment in
a workplace meeting belongs to the colleague who tells the best story. So take
a course in Greek mythology, British literature, political rhetoric or anything
else that exposes you to the structure of narrative and the art of persuasion.
I asked Mitchell scholars if there was
a department or discipline that they wished they had paid more heed. Science
majors mentioned humanities. Humanities majors mentioned computer science and
statistics. In retrospect, if not in real time, intellectually curious people
appreciate and want the benefits of balance. So incorporate it, to some degree,
in your college years.
Several Mitchell scholars also fretted
that they’d lost out on some of what college had to offer by sticking to
predetermined scripts, sweating perfection and avoiding risks. That dovetailed
with a concern that many professors articulate to me — that students aren’t
learning to stumble and to right themselves, which they can do in college with
lower stakes than later on.
One of those scholars, Aaron Kurman,
who graduated from the University of Virginia in 2005 and now works as a human
rights lawyer in Israel,
copped to all of that and more, writing: “I didn’t learn how to fail. I didn’t
learn how resilient I was. I didn’t learn to distinguish between what was truly
important to me and what I was doing because I thought it was important in
others’ eyes. I didn’t learn how freeing it is to pursue what drives you even when others
whose opinions you deeply value don’t understand or support it. I didn’t learn
the value of doing something truly open-ended, where you don’t already know at
the outset what you are going to do next.” All of that came later. But it could
have come in college — at least the beginnings of it.
Something
else that can come in college is an enormously expanded self-knowledge that
translates into a hugely improved design for living. But that hinges on an
adventurous spirit, especially outside the classroom.
“The mistake is to confuse career
success, financial success and reputation with happiness,” said Andrew Delbanco, a
Columbia University professor who is the president of the Teagle Foundation,
which promotes liberal arts education, and the author of the 2012 book
“College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be.” Delbanco added that an important
component of real contentment is figuring out what lights your emotional and
intellectual fires, not necessarily for the purpose of a job but for the
purpose of reflections and pastimes that fill in all those hours away from
work.
Is it poetry? Music? Sport? Those and
more are abundant on college campuses. “You’re trying to shape a life that
leads you to a happy place,” Delbanco said. Let college do precisely that.