How to choose friends and success in college

When entering college, one of the first few things you probably need is choosing friends. Friends are part of life and some friendships could last a long time if you are careful about the kind of friends which you choose. A good friend can help you tremendously but a bad friend can hurt you more than you can imagine. There is an old saying: “Be near ink, you could be dark, be near a lamp, you could be light” so it would be wise to select friends that have similar interests, similar career goals, similar background, and similar age group.

College differs from High school because it has many types of students and you must try to avoid some of them. Stay away from students who are not there to study but just having fun. There are many students who do not have motivation or career goals, they do not know what to do with their life and college is a place where they come to look for people whom they can go out with or to have parties with. There are people who are selfish and looking for others to take advantage of. If you befriend with them, you may end up like them or getting hurt in the end. Students who deceive others are not good friends, students who borrow money, who ask other to help doing their homeworks, to help them cheat on exams, or allow them to copy your works will only hurt you if you allow them to. You should never allow them to take advantage of you and never confide in any person that you do not completely trust. You may do something without thinking in an instant but may regret for the rest of your life. You are responsible for what you do because either you control your attitude or it controls you.

I have seen many students enter college with positive and idealistic attitude but left college full of hurts and hates. That is why you must select friends very carefully and allow friendship to grow gradually through time. Time is your best friend because only through time you will find out who you can trust and who you cannot. You do not have to change friends as some of your friends will change too because only people with similar interests and goals will stay together. True friendship continues to grow, over time and distance but other will fade away as you mature to be more responsible adults. Please remember that maturity has to do with the types of experiences that you have and what you learn from them and not about how old you are. You must remember that college is a major investment of your time, your efforts, your financial, and your family's supports so do NOT waste them. You are solely responsible for who you will become.

Many students pay a lot of attention to the degree but degree is only a piece of paper. A degree does not make you a good person, a responsible person, a good citizen, or a knowledgeable person. It is the attitude, the maturity, the responsibility, the knowledge, the skills that make you who you are in the society. The most important thing in college is your efforts, your efforts to learn, your efforts to overcome obstacles, your efforts to avoid certain temptations, your efforts to stay focus to your career goals. I have seen many students fail to achieve their goals then blame their failures on something else rather than themselves. Many students told me that they are not smart enough, or they do not have the ability to learn certain subjects such as mathematics or chemistry. They believe that some people are born with better brain, more intelligent, better willpower or more skills than others. That is not true because the fact is college success is really depending on efforts. It is not a good idea to praise students that they are smart, I prefer to praise students on their efforts instead. Effort is the quality that really lead to college success.

Some students believe the reason that they failed because they did not know what to do. That is not correct. Students always know what to do but do NOT put in the effort to act. If they want to lose weight, they know what to do. If they want to get along with friends, they know what to do. The issue here is many do not take time to think carefully about what to do or what step that they must take. They know that they have homeworks but when a friend ask them to go to a movie, they accept it and think “I will do the homework after the movies”. After the movies, they will go to the coffee shop to have a few drinks and more talks. Eventually it is late at night so they have to go to bed and the homework is never finish. Some students believe they still can do everything if they work hard but things do not happen like that. If your goal is to study and get good grades than you must define when, how and where you are going to do that. If you do not have a study goals, then you have nothing to implement. Time in college is short with many things to do, students always have many distracting activities, many temptations so they must set priority. If study is not the highest priority then you must ask yourself what are you doing in college? Why are you in college? Why are you spending time and money in college? If you are too busy with so many other things then you will never have time to do one thing right.

Of course, it is difficult to change bad habits once you develop them so I recommend that you follow a simple technique: “The IF-THEN planning” (You do not have to be a computer science students to follow this technique even I borrow it from programming language phrase). Following is an example: “IF it is Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 2:00 PM, THEN I will go to the library to study for 3 hours. IF it is Tuesday or Thursday, THEN I will go to the library at 1:00 PM to study for 5 hours because I do not have class in the afternoon.”. Basically, IF you set your priority, THEN you know what to do. IF you put in the efforts, THEN you will accomplish your priority. IF you select friends carefully and let it grows through time, THEN you will have a friendship that last a long time. IF you do all of the above, THEN you will increase your chance of success in college and achieve your goals. IF you achieve your study goals, THEN your family will be very proud of you. IF you can do that for every goals in life, THEN you will absolutely can be more successful then you imagine.

Sources

  • Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University