First steps toward success in college

I have been reading a lot of online posts recently about choosing a college, about going to a specific university, and about the relative ease or difficulty or prestige (or lack of same) between different schools. And mixed among those stories are the comments made by students saying “I got good grades in high school and I got a really high test score, so how hard can college classes really be?” Well, I’m here to tell you right now that they’re hard enough.

A couple of months ago I looked at the first semester business school grades (after one year of LS&A classes) of 120 BBAs here in light of their high school grades. The main finding might shock some people (but only served to confirm what I had believed): Students who do really well in high school (i.e., GPA of 3.9+ and an A in AP Calculus) can do really well at Ross but also can struggle to maintain a 2.0 GPA, and sometimes even fail to maintain that.

The first steps that any student can take toward success in college are the following:

• Forget how impressive your high school academic record was,
• Respect your peers (because they probably had a record as good as or better than yours),
• Respect your professors (because they were the smart kid in some high school and then some college class 5 to 15 or more years ago), and
• Respect the material (even if it looks something like what you studied in high school, you’re going to be tested on it differently in college).

The sooner that you realize that what you did in high school doesn’t count for much when you’re in college the better off you’ll be. We are all glad that you were an excellent student in high school. We are thrilled that you participated in so many extracurricular activities and contributed so much to your community. These are all wonderful things. All of them have gone into making you what you are today. Let’s sit back and enjoy thinking about them for a minute.

Okay, that was quite enjoyable.

Now let’s get back to the current situation. Those accomplishments don’t count for anything tomorrow when you’re sitting in a college classroom (or later when you have a job) — it will all be about what you do at that time, how you contribute to that community, how you compete and cooperate with those students. This isn’t really anything special to the college admissions process. This is how it will be for the rest of your life so you might as well get used to it. What you have accomplished is what has gotten you to where you are today, but what you accomplish today determines where you will be tomorrow.