of town or have some other reason for needing university accommodation. If you are interested in living in residence, show your interest early, as accommodation may be awarded on a first-come-first-served basis.
If you share accommodations with other university students, remember to respect their needs and wishes. Do your best to be a good roommate. If you are not comfortable in your residence, this will very likely interfere with your progress as a student. If you do have troubles, try to talk them out with the people involved. If that doesn’t work, then try the don, residence adviser or someone else in the residence or housing office. Often the wrong people are put together, but with a few complaints and a little shuffling of student bodies, it doesn’t take long to get the right combinations together.
What Do Grades Really Mean?
There is an age-old argument about the meaning of grades. Does the grade a student gets in a course really reflect what he or she has learned?
At least in the minds of others, your achievement at university will be demonstrated by your grades. I believe that in the majority of courses grades do truly reflect the student’s performance as perceived by the professor. The professor is an expert in his or her field and, by this token (a standard academic phrase, by the way), the professor’s assessment of you indicates how well you have lived up to what he or she expects of students. However, there is some underlying learning that no professor can ever hope to judge. You will gain something from each course that no other individual will. Your uniqueness will allow you to glean information that others will miss. Possibly you will not realize it until years later, but you will. If you learn as much as you can in each course, the grades will come by themselves.
Now that’s my philosophy. But this is not a book on the philosophy of education. It is about survival and succeeding at university. Grades are important. That’s the truth. It’s a fact. If you get lousy grades, a professional school will not accept you. On today’s grade market you need, generally, an average above 80% to be even considered for medical school and usually a much higher grade to be accepted. You need excellent grades for any professional school, for teachers college and for other postgraduate training. To my knowledge, there are no lawyers, doctors or teachers who had a 60% average at university.
Now the problem at hand is to deal with that fact. How can you get above-average grades? I argue that if a student is intelligent enough to be admitted to university then he or she has the potential to get above-average grades. It will take more work for some than for others, but knowing the rules will help.
The only way for a student to get good grades in a course is for him or her to do all required assignments and to learn as much of the course material as well as he or she can. Good grades are an offshoot of knowledge. There’s no way you can fail if you do your work and study.
However, as I’ve mentioned, students typically don’t do very well in their first year at university. For many the freshman experience is a wake-up call that spurs them on to greater success. For others, it’s an academic death knell, causing them to give up and drop out. Others just keep hanging around passing some courses and failing or dropping others. More and more students are falling into that last category. For that reason, as mentioned earlier, the average time it takes for a university student to graduate with a “four-year” Bachelor’s degree is now over five years. In fact, on average, less than 80% of students complete their degrees in five years! But all is not lost. Why? Because simply having the Bachelor’s degree is sufficient for many jobs. Having a degree it shows that you can stick with and complete something. While your marks may not be excellent, you have proven that you are mature enough to face the challenges and finish what you started.
Having said that, it’s important to note that some jobs and, of course, getting into postgraduate programs require reasonable marks as well as the degree. So, if you’ve been doing poorly in your first couple of years, does that mean these opportunities are lost? Not at all! While you may not be eligible to get into medical school or get accepted to a prestigious school for further studies you have other options. The same goes for getting into that highly regarded company or landing that well-paying job. While your early marks may not be impressive, many companies and post-graduate institutions look at your success in the last ten or so courses that you have taken. Many realize that the first years are the most difficult. If you can improve over time, this demonstrates your growth as an individual. So rather than thinking all is lost, you can refocus your efforts to increase your grades in whatever courses or time you have left. That effort will be repaid with more opportunities for your future.
Is It Worth the Trouble?
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
—Thomas H. Huxley
Why should I go to university? Is it worth all the hassle to stay in school? Should I go out and get a well-paying job while I’m young instead of wasting three or four years of my life? If you have asked yourself any of these questions, consider the following facts—(1) there are jobs out there for university graduates and (2) the university experience will give you competence in a large number of areas essential for survival in the working world.
Did You Know?
The value of a university education is supported by study data. Statistics from 2011 reveal that for people aged 25 to 44, the employment rate for those with a Bachelor’s degree was 84.9% compared to 77.1% for those with only a high school diploma.6 Not only are university graduates more employable, they also make higher wages and experience a faster growth in earnings during their careers.7 What is the secret? Why are university graduates more employable? It’s not for the obvious reason that they have specialized in a particular area, but instead it appears to be due to their overall acquisition of valuable, transferable skills.
Your employer can teach you the specific skills that a job requires but cannot give you the broad, general education that you get in university. Your employer cannot take the time, and often doesn’t have the resources, to teach you how to develop your curiosity, imagination or logical thinking. Many students do not realize that their whole curriculum will develop these critical mental skills. It is important for you to take a variety of courses to maximally develop these skills. You should not fall into the trap of taking only job-oriented courses to the exclusion of courses you enjoy. While you carry out your different responsibilities in each course, you will be developing a large number of transferable skills that employers need and want, such as decision making, interacting with others, organizing your time effectively and analyzing, articulating, collecting and synthesizing data.
The world is changing rapidly. What is unusual today will often be commonplace tomorrow. People who possess a wide range of the above-mentioned transferable skills are generally more able to adapt to these changes than those who have specialized in certain functions that may soon become obsolete.
As a student, you learn a diversity of skills regardless of your degree focus. Every student ultimately learns to set priorities, develop time management skills and how to listen and respond appropriately. These and other skills that are learned are fundamental to most occupations.
Many career paths are not obvious, and some occupations may require extra qualifications. Once again, remember to keep your options open—just because you plan to study history doesn’t mean you have to work in a museum or library! By the same token, don’t
