Over at EphBlog, Stephen O’Grady has a post giving advice to the entering class at Williams. A bunch of this stuff is school-specific stuff that will only make sense to another member of the Cult of the Purple Cow, but there’s some good general advice in there as well.
I particularly liked his story about the professor who saved his college career:
Looking back, it’s borderline shocking that I recovered as much as I did academically, given how horrifying my grades were that first year. And, it must be said, my first semester as a sophomore. But while I accept full responsibility for getting myself into that mess, the credit for my recovery belongs entirely to someone else. Part of it was reducing my athletic workload – and the related social calendar – from one sport to two, part of it was a few significant changes in my social life, but the man who more or less singlehandedly salvaged my tenure at Williams was Professor Thomas Kohut.
Just trust me on this: it is not easy to pick a major when you’re barely holding your head above water in all subjects. How can you ask a professor to be your advisor, when you both know you’re failing? When your professors look on you with a mixture of disdain and disappointment? Not that I blame those who did: I deserved that scorn. Fortunately for me, however, there was one exception. Professor Kohut, for motives of his own, spoke to me honestly but not unkindly. Better, he threw me the rope I desperately needed, agreeing to serve as my advisor. With that came a direct and frank appraisal of where I was failing, and what I needed to correct. Instead of writing me off as a lost cause, he took the time to sit and speak with me about his own experiences, and how he thought that I might improve. It may well have been the first time in my academic career that someone treated me as an adult, one reason it was easy to listen.
His opinion – subsequently confirmed – was that I needed smaller, more interactive classes to hold my interest. The difficulty of the material was not, for the most part, my problem; it was rather my engagement with same. Professor Kohut’s recommendation was simple: I was to take smaller classes on subjects that held some interest for me with professors that would care whether or not I was in class. So what I would tell you, Future Williams Graduate, class of 2014, is this: do not write yourself off. You may think, at times, that you’re an idiot, but the folks that run admissions are most certainly not. If you got in, you can do the work. We all make mistakes, it’s how you recover from them that matters. Seek out the professors that understand this and genuinely care – Kohut and Shanti Singham were two of the best I encountered – and stick to them like glue.
This is one of the reasons why one of the most important bits of advice for students going off to college is to get to know some of your professors. It’s also one of the key things that places like Williams (and Union) are selling with their eye-popping tuition.
My own college career had a similar turning point, though it was a little more blunt. I owe a lot of my success to Professor Kevin Jones of the physics department at Williams, for snapping me out of a bad place in my junior year.
The Fall semester of my junior year was a little rough. I was playing rugby, but there were some things that weren’t going well, and I was in kind of a foul mood about that. I was doing a whole lot of drinking, and not enough studying.
Prof. Jones was teaching introductory quantum that term, and stopped me on my way out of class a few weeks into the semester. “Do you have the problem set that was due today?” he asked. I said I was working on it, but had a couple of things I still needed to fix, and would get it in later. This was a blatant lie– I hadn’t started it. Or the previous two, which he also asked about. I said I was still working on them, but wanted to get everything right before I handed them in.
“OK,” he said, “But you know, maybe you should just hand in what you have, and cut your losses.”
It’s not a real warm-fuzzy kind of statement, but what I needed at that point was more a kick in the ass than anything else, and that did the job. I skipped the parties I had been planning to go to that night, and the next couple of days, and spent a whole lot of time in the Physics library doing the homework I hadn’t done to that point. And that pretty much got me turned around– I found a group of other students who worked together on problem sets from that class, and spent most of the rest of my undergraduate career working with them on various things. I ended up with a pretty good grade in that class (I don’t think he penalized me for the stuff I handed in a couple weeks late), and got good grades in the rest of my physics classes.
I’m sure a lot of people who are now successful have similar stories of turning points when they were in college. I try to keep that in mind when I encounter students who seem to be floundering in one way or another, though I can’t say I know of any successes I’ve had in that regard. The few students who I first met as goofball frosh who ended up well mostly turned things around on their own, or at least without an obvious kick from me. But then, I’m not sure Prof. Jones would even remember the conversation that was the turning point for me, though it’ll always be an important one for me.
Of course, the really tricky part is figuring out who needs a kick in the ass, and who needs more gentle intervention…
My turning point was in the other direction, early in my senior year, but fortunately for me it was very short-lived before I recovered.
I’ll be honest, I’m a bit bitter about it all, but it must be nice to find that professor who can point you in the right direction and give you a much-needed lifeline /before/ you get lost for three years of university.
Getting dumped by my girlfriend at the end of my 2nd year was a turning point for me. I doubt I’d have scraped a 1st in my finals if I’d been distracted by having a life, and then my glittering academic career might have been over before it started, instead of shortly after.