The Deep Dive- College Success

This chapter explores the many ways your health is impacted by your lifestyle choices. The goal of this material is to help you do the following:Describe actions you can take to improve your physical health.Identify ways to maintain and enhance your emotional health.Understand mental health risks and warning signs.Articulate reasons and ways to maintain healthy relationships.Outline steps you can take to be more safety conscious.Recent headlines were buzzing with news about a 17-year-old boy who lost his eyesight because of a poor diet. While the boy ate enough food and his weight was considered normal, when doctors investigated, they discovered he didn’t eat enough nutrient-rich food. A self-described picky eater, the teen’s daily diet consisted of sausage, deli ham, white bread, Pringles, and french fries. His food choices led to numerous nutritional deficiencies of several essential vitamins and minerals, causing nutritional optic neuropathy.1Have you heard the saying “you are what you eat”? If so, likely a parent or someone who loves you said it while coaxing you to eat your vegetables. Are we really what we eat, and what does this phrase actually mean? While the example of the boy who lost his vision may be extreme, the food we eat does impact our physical and mental health. What’s at the end of our fork can keep us healthy or eventually make us sick. Every 27 days, our skin replaces itself and our body makes new cells from the food we eat.2 And according to Dr. Libby Weaver, every three months we completely rebuild and replace our blood supply. What you eat becomes you.It’s not only what you eat that impacts your health but also how much you exercise, how effectively you deal with stress, how well you sleep, your work habits, and even your relationships—these things all have an impact on your well-being.There are two primary reasons we become unhealthy. First, we do not deliver enough nutrients for our cells to operate properly, and second, our cells are bombarded with too many toxins. Keeping it simple, good health is proper nutrients in, toxins out. Toxins come from a host of sources—certain foods, the environment, stressful relationships, smoking, vaping, and alcohol and drug use. And if we don’t sleep and exercise enough, toxins can hang around long enough to cause us harm.As a first-year college student you will make many choices without parental oversight, including the food you eat and the way you take care of your body and brain. Some choices put you on a path to health, and other choices can lead you down a path toward illness. There is a strong connection between success in college and your ability to stay healthy.Health is more than a strong body that doesn’t get sick. Health also includes your overall sense of well-being (mental, emotional) and healthy relationships. Good health is about making positive choices in all of these areas, and avoiding destructive choices. It’s about learning to be smart, to set boundaries, to watch out for your safety, and to take care of the one body that will carry you through life.While health and wellness are often interchanged, it is important to differentiate the two concepts. Health is a state of physical, mental, and social well-being, while wellness is a process through which people become aware of and make choices toward a healthy and fulfilling life.

In this chapter, you will learn to reach your personal life goals by implementing financial planning and strategies to protect yourself, manage your money today, and put yourself in a better position for tomorrow. How you act today impacts your tomorrow.By the end of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:Align your personal and financial goals through smart financial planning.Create a saving and spending plan and track your performance.Plan for emergencies.Identify best practices and risks associated with credit cards and other debt.Determine the best opportunities for you to finance your college education.Articulate specific ways to secure your identity and accounts.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”— William H. Whyte1Communication has always been a complex life skill for everyone. How we pass information to others and how we understand what is being conveyed to us can often be complicated. And today, with the ever-increasing number of communication tools at our fingertips, our need to understand how, when, and what we communicate is even more crucial. Well-honed communication skills can improve all aspects of your life. This is true regarding relationships with friends, significant others, family, acquaintances, people with whom you work, colleagues in your classes, and professors. In other words, everyone! Communication is probably the most important skill you can develop in your life.By the time you complete this chapter, you should be able to do the following:Articulate the variables to communication.Define the forms and purpose of communication.Understand how technology has changed communication.Discuss various contexts of communication.Describe barriers to effective communication.

In this chapter you will learn about diversity and how it plays a role in personal, civic, academic, and professional aspects of our lives. By the end of the chapter, you should be able to do the following:Articulate how diverse voices have been historically ignored or minimized in American civic life, education, and culture.Describe categories of identity and experience that contribute to diverse points of view.Acknowledge implicit bias and recognize privilege.Evaluate statements and situations based on their inclusion of diverse perspectives.

Among the most celebrated differences between high school and college is the freedom that students look forward to when they complete their mandatory high school education and take up the voluntary pursuit of a college degree. Though not every college freshman comes fresh from high school, those who do might be looking forward to the freedom of moving away from home onto a campus or into an apartment. Others might be excited about the potential to sleep in on a Monday morning and take their classes in the afternoon. For others, balancing a class schedule with an already-busy life filled with work and other responsibilities may make college seem less like freedom and more like obligation. In either case, and however they might imagine their next experience to be, students can anticipate increased freedom of choice in college and the ability to begin to piece together how their values, interests, and developing knowledge and skills will unfold into a career that meets their goals and dreams.In Chapter 3: Managing Your Time and Priorities, we cover how goal setting and prioritizing help you plan and manage your time effectively. This chapter extends that discussion by recognizing that it can be challenging to stay on task and motivated if you don’t see how those tasks fit into a larger plan. Even the freedom to choose can become overwhelming without a plan to guide those choices. The goal of this chapter is to help you develop the personal skills and identify the resources, tools, and support people to help you make sense of your choices and formulate a personal academic and career plan. We will also consider how to take those first steps toward making your plan a reality and what to do if or when you realize you’re off track from where you had hoped to be.By the time you complete this chapter, you should be able to do the following:Use your personal values to guide your decision-making, set short-term goals that build toward a long-term goal, and plan how you will track progress toward your goals.List the types of college certificates, degrees, special programs, and majors you can pursue, as well as general details about their related opportunities and requirements.Take advantage of resources to draft and track an academic plan.Recognize decision-making and planning as continuous processes, especially in response to unexpected change.

In earlier chapters of this book (1, 3, 4), you learned more about setting the foundation for college and career success by gaining a deeper understanding of why you are attending college, how to set goals and priorities, and how to begin your academic and life planning. By the time you complete this chapter, you should be able to do the following:Learn what a career is and how it applies to you.Identify resources on campus that can help you explore careers and develop a plan.Increase your self-awareness relative to your career aspirations, and map productive steps forward.

By the time you finish this chapter, you should be able to do the following:Outline the importance of memory when studying, and note some opportunities to strengthen memory.Discuss specific ways to increase the effectiveness of studying.Articulate test-taking strategies that minimize anxiety and maximize results.Kerri didn’t need to study in high school. She made good grades, and her friends considered her lucky because she never seemed to sweat exams or cram. In reality, Kerri did her studying during school hours, took excellent notes in class, asked great questions, and read the material before class meetings—all of these are excellent strategies. Kerri just seemed to do them without much fuss.Then when she got to college, those same skills weren’t always working as well. Sound familiar? She discovered that, for many classes, she needed to read paragraphs and textbook passages more than once for comprehension. Her notes from class sessions were longer and more involved—the subject material was more complicated and the problems more complex than she had ever encountered. College isn’t high school, as most students realize shortly after enrolling in a higher ed program. Some old study habits and test-taking strategies may serve as a good foundation, but others may need major modification.It makes sense that, the better you are at studying and test taking, the better results you’ll see in the form of high grades and long-term learning and knowledge acquisition. And the more experience you have using your study and memorization skills and employing success strategies during exams, the better you’ll get at it. But you have to keep it up—maintaining these skills and learning better strategies as the content you study becomes increasingly complex is crucial to your success. Once you transition into a work environment, you will be able to use these same skills that helped you be successful in college as you face the problem-solving demands and expectations of your job. Earning high grades is one goal, and certainly a good one when you’re in college, but true learning means committing content to long-term memory.

In this chapter we will explore two skills you probably think you already understand—reading and note-taking. But the goal is to make sure you’ve honed these skills well enough to lead you to success in college. By the time you finish this chapter, you should be able to do the following:Discuss the way reading differs in college and how to successfully adapt to that change.Demonstrate the usefulness of strong note-taking for college students.Reading and consuming information are increasingly important today because of the amount of information we encounter. Not only do we need to read critically and carefully, but we also need to read with an eye to distinguishing fact from opinion and identifying solid sources. Reading helps us make sense of the world—from simple reminders to pick up milk to complex treatises on global concerns, we read to comprehend, and in so doing, our brains expand. An interesting study from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, used MRI scans to track the brain conductivity while participants were reading. The researchers assert that a biological change to your brain actually happens when you read, and it lingers. If you want to read the study, published in the journal Brain Connectivity, you can find it online at https://openstax.org/l/brainconnectivity.In academic settings, as we deliberately work to become stronger readers and better notetakers, we are both helping our current situation and enhancing our abilities to be successful in the future. Seems like a win-win. Take advantage of all the study aids you have at hand, including human, electronic, and physical resources, to increase your performance in these crucial skill sets.Why? You need to read. It improves your thinking, your vocabulary, and your ability to make connections between disparate parts, which are all parts of critical thinking. Educational researchers Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich discovered after extensive study with college students that “reading volume [how much you read] made a significant contribution to multiple measures of vocabulary, general knowledge, spelling, and verbal fluency.”Research continues to assess and support the fact that one of the most significant learning skills necessary for success in any field is reading. You may have performed this skill for decades already, but learning to do it more effectively and practicing the skill consistently is critical to how well you do in all subjects. If reading isn’t your thing, strive to make that your challenge. Your academic journey, your personal well-being, and your professional endeavors will all benefit from your reading. Put forth the effort and make it your thing. The long-term benefits will far outweigh the sacrifices you make now.

In this chapter you will learn about two of the most valuable tools used for academic success: prioritizing and time management. By the time you complete this chapter, you should be able to do the following:Articulate the ways in which time management differs from high school to college.Outline reasons and effects of procrastination, and provide strategies to overcome it.Describe ways to evaluate your own time management skills.Discuss the importance and the process of prioritization. Articulate the importance of goal setting and motivation. Detail strategies and specific tactics for managing your time.

In this chapter, you will first learn more about identifying the reason you are in college. This is an important first step because knowing your why will keep you motivated. Next, the chapter will cover the transitions that you may experience as a new college student. Then, the chapter will focus on how you can acclimate to the culture and meeting the expectations—all of which will make the transition to a full-fledged college student easier. Finally, the chapter will provide you with strategies for overcoming the challenges that you may face by providing information about how to find and access resources.

In this chapter, you will learn about the art of learning itself, as well as how to employ strategies that enable you to learn more efficiently.After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:Discover the different types of learning and your learning practices.Make informed and effective learning choices in regards to personal engagement and motivation.Identify and apply the learning benefits of a growth mindset.Evaluate and make informed decisions about learning styles and learning skills.Recognize how personality type models influence learning and utilize that knowledge to improve your own learning.Identify the impact of outside circumstances on personal learning experiences and develop strategies to compensate for them.Recognize the presence of the “hidden curriculum” and how to navigate it.

In this chapter, you’ll be introduced to different ways of thinking about the way you think. By the time you complete this chapter, you should be able to do the following:Describe thinking as a process and the reasons it is important.Discuss the importance of creative thinking and ways of generating original ideas.Define analytical thinking, its component parts, and outcomes.Articulate the process and importance of critical thinking.Describe the best approaches to problem-solving.Define metacognition and describe ways to become thoughtful about your thinking.Define information literacy for college students.Whether we admit it or not or even consider it or not, we cannot stop thinking. We think during intense work situations, while we’re playing games, when we eat, as we watch a movie, even during meditation that purports to empty the mind of all thought. Skilled and practiced yogis may be able to get into a state that resembles non-thinking, but most of us keep thinking all the time. Perhaps as you read these lines, you doubt their accuracy suggesting that you don’t really think when you’re just relaxing with friends. But you do. You may think about the other people in the group and what you do or do not know about them. You may wonder what you’ll eat for your next meal. Your mind may flit to question whether you locked the door on the way out. Or you may debate internally whether you’ll finish on time the assignment due for one of your classes. Now, you may not act on any of those random thoughts during this relaxing time, but you are nonetheless thinking. As you begin this exploration of thinking, consider all the ways we turn to technology to assist with our thinking and how thinking impacts and defines various careers.When you consider the word thinking, does your mind drift toward:SchoolWorkRelationshipsFree timeIn this chapter, we’ll look more closely at several distinct types of thinking including creative, analytical, and critical thinking, all of which come into play for problem-solving. We’ll also explore the multitude of resources available relative to understanding and enhancing your thinking skills, all of which constitutes metacognition, the practice of thinking about your thinking.