Conquering College: What They Don't Tell You

CONQUERING COLLEGE:

WHAT THEY DON’T TELL YOU

Phillip Gay with Nafelie Monsour, et al.

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington

Conquering College: What They Don’t Tell You

Copyright © 2009 by Phillip Gay.

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ISBN: 978-1-4401-1963-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-1962-0 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 1/29/2009

Contents

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

This book, Conquering Collgee: What The Don’t Tell You, was written for college-bound students, parents of college-bound students, high school counselors, college students, parents of college students, and all others interested in knowing what students should know in order to get the most out of college.

Everything reported in this book actually happened. Everything this book reports to have been said by students and professors was actually said.

Conquering College: What They Don’t Tell you differs from most how-to-succeed-in-college books in that it goes beyond the surface of university catalog and freshman and transfer-student Orientation Day descriptions of college life and how to succeed in college and beyond. It makes readers privy to informal face-to-face conversations with both past and present college students and professors by presenting, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from three main sources:

1. Representative samples of past and present student responses to questions presented to them on a written questionnaire

2. Face-to-face interviews with both past and present college students

3. The authors’ own experiences as college students, as college professor and college department chairperson, as college undergraduate adviser, and as participants in a wide variety of other college campus activities

Though we present college life and college students from both student and professorial points of view, our primary objective is to provide students with insiders’ knowledge that will help them make their way through college successfully. To do something successfully is to succeed.

By succeed, we mean to attain one’s desired goals or to accomplish what one set out to accomplish—be it sufficiently high grades to gain admission to a top graduate or professional school, or the personal skills and social connections necessary to be successful in a career that does not require the kind of grades necessary to gain admission to a top or any other kind of graduate or professional school. When one succeeds at a particular field of endeavor, one has attained success in that field of endeavor.

AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

The senior author, Phillip Gay, received his B.A. from Case Western Reserve University. His M.A. and Ph.D. degrees are from Harvard University. While a graduate student at Harvard University, he taught at four other Boston-area colleges and universities: Lowell State College (now University of Massachusetts, Lowell), Tufts University, Boston University, and Boston State College. He also served as special recruiter for the Dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Phillip left Harvard and Massachusetts for San Diego, California, where he became a full-time San Diego State University professor and occasionally taught courses at the University of San Diego and the University of California, San Diego.

In the fall of 2004, he became chairperson of the SDSU Department of Sociology, while still continuing to serve as its undergraduate advisor. He has also fathered daughters through the University of California, San Diego; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of California, Berkeley. At present, he is a freelance writer and educational consultant.

Nafelie Monsour graduated from a private college preparatory school in Western Pennsylvania. She began her first year of college at the University of San Diego, from which she received her bachelor’s degree. She has a master’s degree in Sociology from San Diego State University, and is now a candidate for the Ph.D. degree at the University of California, Riverside..

Et al. is Latin. It means and others. We have many others to thank for their contribution to this book.

During the initial stages of this book, the senior author was also assisted by Melissa Bell, an SDSU communications major. Melissa has experienced college as a junior college student living with her parents and siblings, as a student at a four-year college living in a college dormitory, and as a college student living in an off-campus apartment located in a heavily student-populated Southern California beach community. Melissa warrants special thanks for administering the questionnaires to the junior college students in our sample and then taking part in the organization and analysis of the resulting data. Thank you, Melissa.

Nafelie Monsour’s and Melissa Bell’s contributions notwithstanding, this book would not have been possible without the cooperation of the numerous students and ex-students who either submitted to long face-to-face interviews, or took the time to fill out questionnaires. Among other things, they were asked to state the four things they wish that they had known when they began their first semester of college and, in doing so, explain how and why they think they would have benefited from knowning each of those four things.

Some of the past and present college students who submitted to face-to-face interviews and wrote responses to written questions requested that their real names not be given. A name that first appears with an asterisk (*) indicates that the name given is not the person’s real name.

The written student comments presented in this book are presented as they were written—typos, ungrammatical sentences, misspellings, and all. Faculty comments are also presented unedited, as they were spoken—ungrammatical sentences and all.

We thank all of our interview subjects and questionnaire respondents—whether we used their real names or not. This could not have been written without them.

This book, Conquering College: What They Don’t Tell You, is divided into twelve chapters.

Chapter 1, Students: Sybarites, Aspirants, Dilettantes, Slugs, introduces readers to the four most common ways students choose to experience college. The choice of how to experience college is a choice that each and every individual makes upon entering, and as they go through, college. The best choices of how to experience college, we argue, are those that broaden the choice makers’ access to the life, the career goals, and the people they wish to experience in their lives after college.

What would be a good, intelligent choice of how to experience college for one person might be a poor choice for someone else—depending on whether or not the two individuals want to be similar people living similar after-college lives. Students make choices as to what kind of person they want to be, not only during their college years but also during every other period of their lives. The choices they make have long-term consequences.

Before concluding this chapter, we give (through case studies) examples of both the positive and negative consequences of experiencing college in each of the four most common ways.

Chapter 2, Professors: Celebrities, Professionals, Smoothies, Muddlers, answers the following questions: How does one become a professor? How are professors, to be addressed? Professor? Doctor? Mrs.? Mr.? Miss? By first name? Who are they, anyway? From whence do they come? How does a person become a professor? How does a person continue to be a professor? Professors teach classes and determine student grades, but what, if anything else, do they have the power to determine? What are the sources of their powers? To whom are they accountable?

After giving answers to the above questions, we will present readers with a typology of college professors, consisting of four main—but frequently overlapping—types, of which we will provide multiple examples. We also discuss why certain types of students do better in classes taught by some types of professors than they do in classes taught by other types of professors and how to go about increasing their chances of receiving the final grade they desire from each of the four types of professors.

Chapter 3, Let The Major Choose You, gives advice on how to go about deciding which major to choose, when to decide to formally declare a chosen major, the multiple consequences of choosing the wrong major, the benefits of waiting for a major to choose you, the student, and for whom the choice of a major was not—or will not be—of any really great consequence.

Chapter 4, Guidance Counselors: Are They Always to Blame? provides answers to the question asked in its title by offering advice concerning what to expect and not to expect from guidance counselors. It also tells students how to let the major choose them.

Chapter 5 is entitled Grades: How Important Are They? Among the questions addressed in this chapter are the following: How much do grades matter? To whom do grades matter most? Why is it necessary for some students to consistently earn high grades but not so necessary for others to do so? We also discuss how different types of professors go about determining final grades.

Chapter 6, The Class Syllabus: Beware, It Can Be Held Against You, gives an explanation and exemplification of why it is necessary to read the class syllabus, and the consequences of not doing so.

Chapter 7, Goodwill: It’s Good to Have It, gives an explanation and exemplification of the benefits of maintaining the professor’s goodwill, as well as how to go about earning it and how to go about losing it.

Chapter 8, E-mail: Common Misusages, gives an explanation and examples of why e-mail is the least effective means of student–professor communication.

Chapter 9, Sleep: Never Leave Home without It, comments on and gives examples of the importance of sleep and, among other things, advises students to, insofar as possible, take classes that are compatible with their sleep routines—or to bring their sleep routines and lifestyles into compatibility with their class schedules.

Chapter 10, The Halo Effect: More Easily Lost Than Gained warns students of the dangers of assuming that the halo effect lasts forever.

Chapter 11, Letters of Recommendation: Everyone Eventually Needs Someone, stresses the importance of letters of recommendation for some students, how to go about getting strongly positive letters, and how to go about getting negative letters.

Chapter 12, Parting Words, welcomes students to college where, after completing a book, they will be expected to be able to draw their own conclusions.

This book was written to enlighten. We hope it will.

CHAPTER 1

College Students: Sybarites, Aspirants, Dilettantes, Slugs

There is no one college experience. Different students choose to experience college in different ways.

Like other people, students make choices. There are good choices, and there are not-so-good choices. Good choices regarding how to experience college are choices that move students closer to the attainment of their ultimate life and career goals. Bad choices are choices that limit a student’s range of after-college options.

A good choice of how to experience college for one person might be a bad choice for another person—depending on whether the two individuals have similar career goals, whether they aspire to live similar after-college lives, and whether their families’ financial situations are similar, just to name a few things.

Most students go through college having chosen to experience it as either a Sybarite, an Aspirant, a Dilettante, or a Slug.

SYBARITES: WHERE’S THE PARTY?

Sybaris was a Greek city that existed from 720 b.c. to 510 b.c. in what is now southern Italy. Its inhabitants, Sybarites, were reputed to live lives devoted primarily to the pursuit and enjoyment of sumptuous luxury, comfort, and all manner of other sensuous worldly pleasures.

Therefore, Webster’s (Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, New York, 1986))defines a sybarite as one devoted to luxury and pleasure, and we give that name to students who place the pursuit of material comfort, sensual pleasure, and the maintenance of a rich and varied social life above the pursuit of knowledge derived from classroom lectures and readings that professors assign.

The students we call Sybarites are not, however, less likely than other students to be kind, sensitive, intelligent, perceptive, extremely likable human beings. It is not that. It is just that they are, first and foremost, Sybarites.

There are more Sybarites on some college campuses than on others. The more Sybarites in attendance at a college or university, the greater the likelihood of that college or university being known as a party school. Some high school students choose to attend, or not attend, this or that college or university because of its reputation as a party school.

Sybarites are male and female, of all racial, ethnic, and religious