College Knowledge for the Jewish Student: 101 Tips

1. The Ten Commandments for College Success and Happiness

The Ten Commandments for College Success and Happiness 1 Believe in Your (Jewish) Self As a Jew, you are a member of the “People of the Book.” Your parents and grandparents hold high expectations for you in college and in life. Your synagogue or temple has honored you and put you on a pedestal for your high school accomplishments. Your peers are bright, have high aspirations for college, and all seem to have done well throughout their schooling. Your siblings have been very successful at college. It’s all great, right? But talk about pressure!! OK, take a deep breath and relax. Everything is going to work out just fine. I can’t overstate the importance of maintaining your self-confidence at college. You are a bright, capable person, and if you have good study habits and the desire to succeed, you will do just that at each and every college that offered you admission. Know that this is true, remind yourself daily, and never question your intellectual abilities. There is a mind game that gets played out at every college regardless of its guidebook ranking. Very simply, students worry that they’re not up to the college’s or their family’s standard. Unfortunately, colleges 1 1 COLLEGE KNOWLEDGE fOr THE JEWiSH STuDENT 2 do very little to allay such fears. First-year students look at their peers in the residence hall cafeteria, at the college convocation, or at the first lecture or seminar and worry that they’re just not as smart as the other students. Many students, when they are speaking openly to me, wonder aloud whether the college admissions office made a mistake in admitting them. Deep down in a vulnerable place inside them, they imagine that if the college admissions office had truly read their applications carefully, they would not have been deserving of admission. After all, with so many other smart students in their school and now sitting with them in college, how could they have been fully competitive and worthy of admission? I experienced this same fear when I attended college many years ago. Sure, I was a good student in high school, but I worried that I would be found out once I got to college. Maybe the admissions office accidentally put my application in the wrong pile and sent me the wrong letter. I wondered whether colleges ever send out “so sorry” letters retracting admissions to students like me. Of course this is all silliness. And if such a notion should ever come over you, just let go of it immediately. College admissions offices know what they’re doing. The truth is that colleges receive applications from so many outstanding students that they must reject hundreds, even thousands, of qualified students. So, clearly, everyone who is admitted is fully capable of doing outstanding work. The key is discovering what your interests are, finding your own identity, meeting good students and faculty, and developing good study skills. When you hear others talk about all the smart kids at college, know that they’re talking about you. SAT/ACT scores? Once you’re in college , no one cares about those exams and what your score was. Your high school GPA? Forget it. After the first few weeks of college, high school will seem like years in the past. No one is interested. What faculty members and the other students will be interested in is you—in The Ten Commandments for College Success and Happiness 3 your ideas, your interests, what you care about, what classes you are taking, papers you are writing, books you are reading, and what you hope to accomplish in your life. When I first entered high school in ninth grade with a class of 1,500 other students, our principal gave a welcoming speech to us in our huge high school auditorium. He told us to look at the student sitting next to us on our right and then to turn and look at the student sitting next to us on our left. Then he told us that in four years, at the end of twelfth grade, one of the three of us would not be there for graduation. I remember that sorry speech and its negative message all too well. But unlike my high school principal’s advice, you should approach your college education with full confidence that you will graduate in four years. And your...