1.5 How Can This Book and This Course Help?
Questions to consider:
- How will you be able to develop your purpose?
- In what ways will you be able to create strategies for your success?
- What other resources can you use to help you succeed?
As Reggie and Marisol go through their college experiences and create a balance between their academic and personal lives, their stories, no doubt, will diverge. But you can be assured that each of them will demonstrate grit, the ability to stay focused on a goal over the long-term, along the way. As Duckworth (2016) has said, it takes passion and perseverance to be gritty. It also takes resilience or the ability to bounce back from adversity. The challenges you face will certainly stretch you, but if you have these three things—purpose, strategies, and resources—you will be more likely to bounce back, even become stronger in the process. This book has been designed with these things in mind.
Develop Your “Why”
This chapter began with the suggestion to explore why you are in college or more simply, what your purpose is. This course—and this book—will help you continue to refine your answer and create a map for your journey to fulfill your purpose. The features in this book that help you develop your purpose include the following:
- Student Survey Questions: Each chapter opens with several questions that provide you with a snapshot of how you feel about the chapter content. How does this feature help you develop purpose? It allows you to develop better self-awareness, which will in turn help you build an awareness of your purpose.
- Questions to Consider: At the start of each section, there will be a set of questions to ask yourself before you start reading. By asking these questions, your brain is primed to focus on what is most important.
Refine Your Strategies for Success
Purpose by itself may illuminate the pathway forward, but it will take strategies to help you complete your journey. Think of the strategies you will learn in this course as tools you will need along the way to completing your degree. The following features provide you with an opportunity to practice and refine strategies for success:
- Analysis/Application Questions: Any time you are asked to apply what you are learning in the chapters you are improving your skills. Look for them throughout and take some time to stop, think, and use the skill.
- Activities: As you read, you will also have the opportunity to interact with the content. They give you the chance to refine the strategies that will help you succeed in college.
Summary
This chapter introduces the transition to college by first asking “Why”? Understanding why you are in college, what your life purpose is, and what a college degree can do for you is the foundation of making a smooth transition. These transitional experiences are part of being in college. This chapter provides you with information about what to expect and how to handle the changes you will go through. Next, the chapter discusses college culture and how to understand the customs and language of higher education. These customs include college policies and how to stay safe on campus. The chapter ends with an introduction to resources provided throughout the textbook that can help you practice skills and dive deeper into the topics.
Works Cited
- This is a derivative of COLLEGE SUCCESS by a publisher who has requested that they and the original author not receive attribution, which was originally released and is used under CC BY-NC-SA. This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.