Beyond Textbooks: Essential Skills for College Success

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Just when you think that everything you will need to know is straight from a textbook, you will soon enter university and be proven wrong. Being book smart does not equate to being successful in college. There are so many aspects that contribute to one 's college success. These include critical thinking, goal-setting, learning styles, note-taking and reading skills. Critical thinking is a mode of thinking about any content or problem in which the thinker improves the quality of their thinking by thoroughly analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is essential in college because it is a time where we are receiving so many new experiences. We have to adapt to these new changes and also assess our comfortability with our …show more content…

Goals motivate you to do your best in your courses. Making small goals easy to reach will benefit you in the long run. These small goals could include going up a grade point, spending a certain amount of time studying, or simply attending office hours. It is essential that the goals you set are a good mix of attainable and challenging. This way they will benefit you by keeping you motivated in your classes. A good thing to remember in achieving these goals is that you must be authentic in your pathway to success. One of the worst things that a student can do is plagiarize someone else’s work. Plagiarism is not only unfair to the person being copied off of but also to yourself. You are doing yourself a disservice when you don’t utilize your own thoughts and ideas. Maintaining academic integrity is essential as a …show more content…

The different types of learning styles are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Visual learners prefer to study with the aid of visual stimulus like diagrams, images, drawings, mind-maps. Auditory learners prefer to study by listening, watching videos with sound, and reading out loud. Kinesthetic learners prefer to study by actually doing an activity, writing out notes while in a lecture, doodling while listening, or practical work. These learning styles will benefit you in developing a studying and note-taking routine. When you know your learning style, you can adapt your notes accordingly. For example, visual learners may want to use symbols or color coding while kinesthetic learners may want to use doodles to display information. Note-taking is an effective way of studying and will help students feel more confident when exam time comes around. In addition, simply reading through textbook pages is not effective, you must annotate your text to fully process the information. For example, highlighting the text is a good way to emphasize the main concepts that you will need to grasp for the exams. No one is going to take your exams for you so it is best that you adapt your note taking and reading methods to fit you

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