Off To College

My youngest granddaughter is off to college this week.  I’ve been thinking about what this means to a young person, and perhaps I can shed a little light on your new adventure.  Yes, you will be own your own and making your own decisions.  But, it also means that you have to clean up your own messes.  You might want to keep those to a minimum.

There is a story about Socrates and a young boy who asked, “How do you know so much?”  They were sitting on the bank of a river, so Socrates took the boy by the neck and pushed his head under the water and held him there.  Just before he drowned, he let him up and when the boy finally got back to breathing, he yelled at the old man, “You crazy old man, you tried to drown me.”  The old man wisely asked, “When your head was under the water, what did you want more than anything in the world?”  The boy replied, “Air.”  Then Socrates calmly said, “When you want knowledge that much, you will find it.”

In one’s pursuit of knowledge, one must know your strengths weaknesses.  You cannot be the best at everything, but you can give everything your best.  When you don’t know, ask questions.  There rarely is a stupid question.  Chances are when you ask a question, there is at least one other person in the class that will have the same question, but was afraid to ask.  And, they will never admit they had the same question after you ask it.

You will have to learn to ask for help.  The strange thing about asking for help is that you are paying the person you ask a compliment.

Take what you learn and associate it with daily life so it will be easier to remember.  This means you have to study and work to understand what you learn.  And, you will find some classes don’t make any sense at all, but you still have to pass them anyway.

Be disciplined and do what has to be done first.  This is tough to do, when you want to do something else besides study - anything else as I remember.  For the rest of your life you will have to be disciplined so you must learn it now.

You will encounter people, including professors that will try to influence what you think and believe.  The best advice is avoid serious disagreements, especially with professors.  Stay focused on why you are in college, to learn what you will need to pursue your dreams.  Life is full of obstacles, so just work around them.

You will fail at something, an exam, an assignment or sometime maybe even a course.  Failure is not final or fatal.  It simply means that something wasn’t done correctly.  You get a second chance.  Try to remember that Abe Lincoln was a failure many times before he became president.  Charles Schultz failed at so many things he wrote ‘Peanuts’ about a little boy that always failed.  It was his autobiography.  He turned failure into perhaps the best know comic strip in the world.

Off to college is an adventure to the rest of your life.  It’s up to you.  But, you are not alone.

When all else fails, ask someone that’s been there before.

PMO
©2016