How to Do Well In College

I am not very smart. But I did very well in college. (See the asterisk * at the bottom for details.)

I am now a college professor.

In Fall 2021, I was assigned to teach a course that was meant to give first-year students the foundational skills they would need to succeed in college. “Should I just tell them all my secrets for getting good grades?” I asked myself. “Yes,” I answered myself. “Yes, I should.”

Part I: Motivation

When I started giving away my secrets for how to do well in college, I found that some of my students needed to first be convinced that they should want to do well in college. So I wrote this first lecture. It’s a pep talk. In it, I try to persuade students that they really do need to bother developing the study skills contained in the remaining lectures.

Part II: Study Skills

Here you go. Here is how to do well in college.

Lecture #2
Don’t Work Hard, Work Efficiently

Lecture #3
Make Your Courses Easy

Lecture #4
I Know It Sounds Crazy, But Try to Actually Learn

Lecture #5
How to Read a Syllabus

Lecture #6
How to Maintain a Calendar (and Have a Happy Life)

Lecture #7
How to Defeat Procrastination (Yes, Really!)

Lectures #8
How Much to Read for College Courses

Lecture #9
How to Retain What You Read

Lecture #10
How to Memorize

Lecture #11
How to Take Notes

Lecture #12
Interacting with Professors
(Office Hours, Email Etiquette, Letters of Recommendation, etc.)

* Bragging about one’s academic accomplishments is pretty cringeworthy. But you should only take advice from people who know what they’re talking about. So here goes…

My undergraduate education was at Williams College (the best small college the the United States) and the University of Oxford. I was deans list every semester and graduated summa cum laude—that’s the top 2% of the graduating class—with a 3.96 GPA. My undergraduate transcript is here. Then I was awarded an academic fellowship that paid for my master’s degree at the University of Cambridge (this one). Then I went to UC Berkeley (a top-10 PhD program in Philosophy). As a PhD student, I received all As in my coursework and won the prize for the best graduate student paper, which they only award when a paper “goes considerably beyond the level necessary for successful completion of the course requirements in our graduate program.” Then I really hit the jackpot and got a tenure-track faculty position straight out of graduate school.