Do the reading, homework, and assignments as soon as you can, and sleep well.
Buy a vehicle that looks like the campus maintenance vehicles and get easy parking around campus.
Go to office hours and ask thoughtful questions, you can network with both students, staff, instructors, and TAs, everyone is your network.
In some universities its cheaper to not buy a parking pass, and just pay the tickets (assuming its infrequent enough).
I can't say I know anything about the parking/car stuff as that sounds very US-specific, but I can second everything else.
Don't get complacent with the work, stay on top of it, and if you ever feel yourself falling behind, don't be scared to ask for help. Literally everyone wants to see you succeed, but the further you fall behind the harder it gets.
At the same time, allow yourself to have some fun too.
Do what it takes to pass your classes in university, but prioritize finding an internship or entry level job for your career. No one cares about your GPA, but all entry level jobs want experience.
To avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of graduating and never getting a job because they want experience, and you can't get the experience unless they give you a job, get an entry level job in college and try to get extra responsibilities in that job for your resume.
The best advice.
No one told me how important internships were. I still got a job but I definitely was behind my peers. A lot of them left for top companies. My first job wasn't nearly as good and it took me several years to start making the same pay they were.
Having at least a few hours of sleep between all that shit you studied and your test will get better results than pulling an all nighter to study like 4 more hours. First of all, your brain sucks balls at information storage and retrieval when you're exhausted. And second of all, sleep is when your brain organizes all the new info you picked up, so you will actually remember more of what you studied after you've slept.
If a bartender asks for an ID and you're under age, dont give them shit, just them doing their job. Along the same lines, RAs arent doing their shit for fun most of the time. Ignoring check-in rules are fine, ignoring week day quiet hours is not.
Living on campus can cost more but you are more likely to go to school events when its a quick walk versus driving. On the other hand, its easier to party a bit too hard when its always around you.
Walk through every hall at least once. Maybe you never take a class in that one, but you might miss out on seeing a nice mural or some flyer.
Getting involved in clubs can help make you friends, I was in college band and other than the hard work, it paid plus made a ton of friends along the way
In every class, try to score as high as possible on the first assignment/exam. Since less material is covered at that point, less effort is required per unit of results.
Then later in the semester, you're free to put your effort where it's most needed, instead of needing to scramble across all your classes because you need good results on the final assignments just to pass.
Also, in subjects with group work, it lets you survive a bad group, rather than failing your course because you get stuck with some maladjusted dingus. Moreover, you can use your high grades on the first assignment to leverage your way into a good group. This kind of group-work metagaming is especially important in engineering subjects, and doubly so again if the course is bell-curved.
Finally, try to do one creative thing per year and put it in a public forum, especially on a platform you control (e.g. a blog). Even small things are OK. Literally having any body of work outside of class assignments will let you crush 90% of your peers when applying to grad school, a job, a scholarship, or really just about anything with a halfway sane selection process. It's also fun (doing creative things, not crushing your peers).
I would say with the bad group thing there are two things that massively improve your chances: A) being group leader and B) sometimes being okay with doing a majority of the work and just asking people to do cleanup. I've had so many projects go faster from doing all of the hard parts of the project on the condition that they make it look polished.
Don't buy the textbooks. You probably don't need them. If you do, buy a used one from another student for 1/100th of the price or get an online copy.
I'll leave this here for all your free text book needs https://libgen.is/
Also your mileage will vary depending on the book/edition, but a lot of times a "new edition" of a textbook is just a transparent cash grab by the publisher and is 99% the same material with different page numbers, so it's worth asking the prof/a TA if the previous edition is pretty much the same. You can generally get "outdated" editions of a textbook for startlingly little money. Like I'm talking sub-$5 for a book that's $140 new sometimes.
When I was a TA for a gigantic intro class they'd just released a new edition of the book we used but they'd only sent us two desk copies (publishers send free copies to professors who teach out of their textbooks), and the class was run by a professor and three TAs, so the TAs all had to share one copy of the new edition and taught out of the old edition 90% of the time. They'd only changed one chapter, so the professor scanned that one chapter to PDF and we handed it out to anyone with the old edition.
We also had, for some reason, like five boxes of the old edition under a desk in the department office and gave them out to anyone who would take them. You can hardly give old editions of textbooks away.
The best way to cheat on tests is not to write it down somewhere because they might notice and take it away.
Instead, commit the material to memory and copy from there. They'll never know.
Create a schedule and adhere to it.
Make friends, join clubs, and have fun.
Attend your lectures. I found that even if I was doing work for another class or playing on my iPad, I still gained something from attending lectures.
Go to office hours and build a relationship with your professors.
Create a four year plan of all of your classes. Your advisor may not be a good one and can fuck you over.
Take some summer classes at your local community college (check to make sure they transfer over).
Don't overly stress yourself out with grades. C's get degrees (unless you're trying to go to grad school or professional school, then you're going to have to try harder than a C)
Advisors are generally shit. My degree had classes that were spring/summer only, fortunately I had friends to tell me, the advisors don't say shit.
Someone I know almost didn't graduate this semester because his advisor gave him all of his easy classes in the fall semester and made him take 18 credits of hard engineering classes this spring. My advisor didn't allow me to request a time override despite them only having a conflict of one hour on one day. I need both of those classes to graduate and I couldn't take the other section because it was during the same time of my other major class. Luckily, it was a blessing in disguise and I was able to take that class this summer at a community college which was way easier than taking it at my home institution
Don't sleep on your university's career services office.
Not ethical: If you have to submit assignments (like
.docxfiles) online and you haven't finished it in time, take a random.docxfile and edit it in a text editor (like notepad) and add/delete some random stuff. You can send this file and the professor won't be able to open it so you will get an extension by default.Just ask for an extension. Professors have seen this "trick" a thousand times and know exactly what you're doing. They will respect you more and give you more leeway in the future if you're straight with them.
Ah cool. I never had to use this myself but I always found it kind of cool. I guess it's good I never had to use this lol.
This might be rudimentary for some folks, but anyone like me: meet with counselors regularly to make sure you're on-track for graduation!
I was my own counselor. I used the course catalogs to determine what courses I needed to take to graduate. I thought I was doing well til I found (during what I assumed was my last semester) that I needed additional math credits and anothet credit in some other weird category to graduate. I took summer courses of Pre-Calc and Bowling to graduate a semester later than expected.
Holy shit. Me, too. Yes, nothing quite so sad as Bowling For Diplomas.
Lol no kidding. Glad we made it out the other side! I'm assuming you're from the US as well?
Aside from the initial class meeting, my bowling credit was largely "independent study", meaning I just had to log 9 games a week at the school's rec center bowling alley.
I mistakenly did the math one day. I don't remember the figures (thank goodness) but I'd have saved a lot more money than I thought (for a cheaper state school) just....bowling 9 games a week at the local bowling alley.
But where's the prestige of a college credit approved by my professor, a fella that I think played Lollipop Chainsaw on the Xbox + "Party in the USA" over the PA every day I went in that summer? Lol
Join study groups, and when others ask questions, explain the answers as best you can in your own words.
This was key in study retention.
