TIPS FOR FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS

Celeste Leander, a professor and academic director of first-year experience at UBC, says great university-level habits don’t have to start in freshman year on campus. Here are four tips to give high-school students an edge:

Break up studying into short chunks:

“Even five or 10 minutes at a time. The tendency is to schedule like: ‘I’m going to spend three hours tonight on physics.’ What happens is you’re not mentally engaged and it’s hard if you’re reading textbooks to get through that kind of volume of material. It really helps to break that up into small chunks.”

Be your own best advocate:

“The minute you’re feeling like you’re struggling on something, or you’re unsure about something, get help right away. Everybody wants you to succeed. Your professors want you to succeed, most universities have lots of resources for writing help and all sorts of stuff. A lot of times at UBC, we have such high-achieving students that come in and they start to feel insecure about themselves when they do reach that point where they would benefit from asking for help, so a lot of those resources are under utilized.”

Join or create a community of learners right away:

“Good teachers know that and they’ll specifically assign projects that are done in groups (for students) to meet people. But even for students who do study best by themselves, we know there’s good evidence to show that students who form those close relationships early on really thrive.”

Make sure to schedule downtime:

“Where you can, just shut off. When you start university, some people, for the first time in their life, are in a situation where the work is never done. You can just study forever and you’ll never know everything, and that’s the way it goes. I think we set up habits really early on that carry on throughout our lives, and I think that’s one that a lot of people miss: to consciously schedule downtime where you’re not committed to stuff.”