Top Tips for College Success (2024)

Are you showing up to class prepared and putting meaningful thought in your work?
Students learn more when they are actively involved in their education and engage in joint educational efforts with other students. Do you participate in class, interact with other students, and extend learning outside of the classroom?

Maintain a schedule, know important dates.
Develop time management strategies such as using a calendar, to-do lists, and doing work incrementally instead of all at once at the last minute.

Go to campus events, join clubs, visit Student Life and Leadership.
Meet with teachers: Do you communicate with professors and Deans about academic performance, career plans, course content and assignments? Doing so will allow you to receive strong Letters of Recommendation for scholarships!
Students who feel like they belong and are supported are more successful in college.

College is a period of great personal, career, and academic growth. The counseling process helps students learn more about themselves, identify coping strategies, and emerge with enhanced self-confidence.
Choosing a field of interest to focus your studies is challenging and complex. Work with a counselor to help you feel more confident and through in your career exploration.

Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses your acquisition of knowledge, and helps you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the most of your life.

Come prepared to class by reviewing and outlining relevant reading assignments.
Actively listen by trying to absorb the information you're hearing the first time around, focus on key words and concepts, formulate your notes as a series of questions raised by the material, then fill in your own answers. Finally, ask questions for clarification.
Don’t forget to review your notes immediately and regularly (not cramming) while organizing them to help your focus on what is important.

Have a growth mindset. Think positively to learn and see challenges as opportunities.
Prioritize. What is most important at that moment, day, week? How much are assignments worth, and when are they due?
Choose study time, location, and circ*mstances wisely.
Practice testing yourself.

Develop awareness of your strengths, skills, habits, and mindset.
Develop self-discipline through clear desire, keeping your word, removing temptations, maintaining consistency and congruency in action and values.

Beginning in the Fall 2022, all NEW students will need to take a First Year Experience course, FYE101 or FYE103!

The staff in the Learning Center meet with students, help them with time management, organizational skills, and study skills, and help the navigate SMCC, connecting them with offices and programs that can help them or can help them to get the most that they can out of their time at SMCC.