Okay so, I officially committed to a college today. I'll be going there in the fall. A majority of my knowledge about college comes from stuff that I've seen in TV shows, movies and have heard from random people. For those of you who are actually enrolled in a university right now, how is it like and what should I expect?
most unis here have lots of things (unions, clubs and societies etc) but mine has none of that because it's so tiny. it's not even a campus so i'm just in a random block of flats 2 miles away from the uni with no friends lol
i'm going to update this thread many months later because i'm procrastinating doing homework.
college is actually freaking awesome, and although i had a bit of a rough start things gradually improved and i'm now at a spot where things are pretty wonderful. mainly because i'm involved with all the nerdy musical stuff.
also believe it or not, some of the advice in this thread i actually took to heart and found pretty helpful, so thank you!
a bit late i realize since you've already started term but don't buy textbooks whenever you can help it and never ever ever from the campus bookstore or w/e you got.
Lots of textbooks for intro level classes can actually be torrented or downloaded as PDF files. do searches with keywords like PDF.
Make friends in your major and pay attention to who has taken what classes; if you're taking something next term a friend is taking the current term, ask them for their books.
a decent amount of the time I would literally get all my texts for the term from my college library, i did all my studying/reading there anyway so I didn't even check stuff out.
if you need to buy amazon is rarely the cheapest place; do searches by ISBN and shop in smaller online outlets like abebooks. always pay close attention to their shipping charges tho.
don't bother buying texts at all if you're taking some rando elective unless it's like an English class or something else where you're clearly going to fail if you don't do the reading; ask people you know who have taking certain classes before if the reading actually matters at all for your grade.
should be obvious but don't buy stuff that's on the public domain ie old stuff. if you're taking an english course that's not on contemporary stuff, chances are you shouldn't be paying for the majority of your reading list.
oh and editions don't actually matter nine times outta ten, no matter how much the prof says they do.
My English 101 prof decided that APA and MLA are completely useless and makes us write one massive paragraph that can last up to 8 pages because he feels like making us do it
i generally use easybib which is a life saver, imo.
anyway i'm in my second week of college now and i feel like a fully adjusted student. im sure that i'll be screwed when my classwork gets harder, though
or use CiteMe online, which is infinitely better and faster..
deletedabout 9 years
you should ask people around if your school have sales group where everybody sells their things and it'll save you a lot of money whenever you need something
deletedabout 9 years
College is way better than I thought it would be
deletedabout 9 years
just some homework tip, if you're going to do a paper and have to do bibliography/works cited/references, download mendeley or zotero (i much prefer mendeley) it'll save you so much time rather than having to format MLA or APA manually
I've saved thousands by using this method, in addition to scanning chapters from books that professors hold at the library for students to check out for 2-hour periods.
Most information that you need can easily be found in other textbooks... you just have to know what to look for!
