Learn Everything You Can

In my 25 years teaching college, students have asked me the same question hundreds of times: what’s the secret to being successful in college? I suspect that students think there is some sort of silver bullet that is the key to being “good” at college. The thing is, there is no silver bullet. Everyone is different. Everyone has different strengths. Everyone has different weaknesses. The closest thing I have to a silver bullet for education is this: learn everything you possibly can.

That might seems self-evident, but it’s not. Too often, I have had students who were clearly just trying to get through a course, to survive. That’s not the way to go through life, let alone college. Look at it this way. In college, you are paying for your education. Does it make any sense to take something that you are purchasing and treat it as anything other than something from which you are trying to wring out every bit of value?

My advice is, as a student of life, not just in a formal setting, become the epitome of a Renaissance Man. Learn everything that you can about everything you encounter. If you do everything you can to learn everything you can, then how can you fail?

In some areas, this might be challenging, but it is the best way to succeed. When getting my masters degree, there was a required course in Management Information Systems. This class was about computer-networking theory. There was not a computer in the room. I had been warned by other students to only take this class from a specific professor (which I did) and it was still brutal. The material was so dry that the professor would sometimes yell at us or clap his hands really loud or knock the hardback textbook off the podium to slam on the linoleum floor just to help the students remain awake. So I needed a method to survive, let alone to learn everything that I could. An assignment that ran throughout the course was to compile an article database, where we were required to collect three articles a week that were related to information technology. I have worked in the food industry for many years, I love to cook, I love to eat, so that seemed like a good way to overlap this assignment with my interests. So all my articles were about using information technology in the preparation of food, in the sale of food, in the distribution of food. Not only was it interesting to me, but the professor said he loved the spin I put on it, because reading all those articles threatened to kill him every time he taught the course.

So what is the secret? Focus on learning everything you can. If you do this, the good grades will follow naturally, aside from benefitting from knowing more than you did when it started.

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