This article is adapted from Davidson Institute’s student version of “Early College – Considering the Options: A Guidebook for Investigating Early College Entrance”, part of our collection of free guidebooks for gifted and 2e families. For a deeper dive into supporting your gifted or twice-exceptional child, we encourage you to explore the full guide.
Students who are successful in college aren’t just smart; they are skilled, knowledgeable, organized, and highly motivated. They are also flexible and resourceful in seeking assistance. Especially if they have skipped some of the usual steps along the way, they need to be sure they are broadly prepared.
Remember that you will need to take courses in a variety of fields to fulfill the liberal arts requirements of undergraduate education, not just the courses in your area of interest. As a full-time college student, you do get to choose from a rich menu of courses, but you’ll have to take some from “Column A, Column B, and Column C” before concentrating on your major. At the same time, if you think you are headed for eventual concentration in math, science, or engineering, you need to be prepared to take a healthy menu of college-level math and science courses right away while also fulfilling the other requirements. These are some recommendations to assist you in your preparation for early college entrance.
Priorities
You need to have developed time management skills and independence from your teachers and parents in handling the affairs of your life. Managing time well is the most significant way in which effective and ineffective students differ from one another. You’ll have a good deal of what seems to be free time – typically, you’ll only be in class 15 to 18 hours a week, even with a lab – but for each credit hour you are taking, you will be expected to do about two to three hours of independent work. If you need a parent to keep you organized, if you don’t do your homework in a timely way or read assignments before they are discussed in class, you’re not ready to benefit fully from a college experience. (Review time management information and suggested resources in Section 2 as needed.)
Managing time well does not mean devoting all your time to your studies, and it does not mean secluding yourself from other students and doing everything on your own. You need to be able to make time for at least one outside activity, to keep yourself physically active, and to manage time to talk and study with fellow students in order to deepen your understanding and to become acquainted with different ways of looking at the same ideas.
You also need to learn how to pick and choose among extra-curricular activities so that you can focus on a few you really enjoy. Often, you need to learn how to graciously turn down some interesting offers so that you can keep your life manageable. Many under-challenged secondary school students fill up their lives with a great many activities either to avoid boredom or because they think they need to be “well-rounded” for colleges to want them. If you continue such a pattern at college, you are likely to be too scattered to do quality work or to be an effective leader at any of the activities you do decide to undertake.
Stress Management
You need to think about how you manage stress – both academic and otherwise – and to practice effective strategies to get through stressful periods. Often, students who are stressed begin to spin their wheels, use their time poorly, give up opportunities for pleasurable activities, and endure sleep deprivation that only worsens the situation. Whom do you talk with when you are stressed? How do you break the pattern? Are you able to prioritize? Are you able to break down tasks to do-able portions? Do you make plans and stick to them? Can you take a reasonable break and come back refreshed? Does listening to music or doing physical activity help you? What else gets you back in charge of your life?
You need to learn how to ask for help! Often, very bright students have had practically no experience asking questions when they are stymied, because they seldom have that experience in regular school. You need to ask questions in a way that helps specify exactly where you are stuck. Be sure you learn where to find such help – during the office hours of your professor or his/her teaching assistant, homework hotlines, homework labs on campus, on-line materials, asking your fellow students (you’re probably used to other students asking you), or talking to the professor after class. Be prepared with your questions and be sure that you’ve done the work expected of you.
One of the best ways to prepare not only for college but also for productivity during the rest of your life is to have pursued a talent area over a period of time with perseverance and pleasure. If you play the violin, for example, you have the great advantage of having a concept of what constitutes excellence in performance, a sense of the payoff you get for disciplined practice, a pride in your own progress toward your goals, an ability to take your coach’s criticism in a positive light, and an ability to encounter rough spots and figure out ways through or around them.
Diversity
You need to be prepared to meet and to respect people who have backgrounds and ideas very different from your own, and to be open to new ideas yourself. That may be the main thing that college is all about. Growth is change. Sometimes, when very young students attend college, they are not confident enough to examine their own beliefs and to let themselves modify those ideas in line with their new experiences. You need to be able to see your college studies in a broad context, valuing the increasingly complex ways in which you view the world and enriching your life beyond the classroom.
Academic Skills
You need to consider how you present yourself in class. Learn to be succinct but clear in your class comments and questions – and respectful of others. Be sure that your contribution forwards the discourse and isn’t just a matter of waiting until your turn to comment on something that was said ten minutes before.
You need to have note-taking skills in situations you are unlikely to have encountered previously – 50-minute lectures, somewhat disorganized class discussions, class schedule changes, even videos. Skills at outlining help a great deal, but a lot of practice is essential. Develop a set of abbreviations for frequently used words or expressions. Give yourself a number of opportunities to practice these skills in the year or so before you go to college. Attend public lectures and take notes, take notes while watching television documentaries, take notes in your regular school classes, and so on. You might ask a parent or classmate to do the same thing and then compare what the two of you have gotten out of it. Once you’ve taken the notes, rewrite them right away (while you can still read your handwriting); doing this on the computer will be most helpful. Leave wide enough margins for additional notes when you use these materials to review for exams.
You need excellent expository writing skills. This type of writing is more objective and factual in nature and is often used in explaining processes, definitions, concepts and ideas, such as in essays and business writing. For students of all ability levels, this is the area needing the most improvement. You need to be able to respond to assignments and examinations in a variety of styles, including:
- Brief, succinct answers that express a full idea in a sentence or two
- Short essays (a few paragraphs)
- Writing for 30-60 minutes on the same topic
- Term papers that represent comprehensive coverage of a topic – 10-30 pages, developed over the course of several weeks
- For much of your work, you will need to know how to cite evidence for your opinions; to take into account ideas that do not agree with yours; to compare and contrast authors, ideas, or arguments; and to be persuasive, not argumentative
You need enough speed in keyboarding to make it a truly effective tool. A speed of 50 – 60 wpm is probably minimum for this purpose; faster is better. Eventually, you want not to be thinking about your typing at all. All your assignments should be typed, and many will eventually be revised.
At the same time, you need to develop legible handwriting and accurate spelling and English usage, both for your own notes and for exam questions. No professor should be expected to overlook the distraction of poorly written material.
Particularly if you have skipped some high school subjects, you should be sure to read a wide variety of literature of the kind usually covered in high-school language arts, to be generally well prepared to understand the scientific method, to tolerate some ambiguity in thinking about big questions (many important ideas have more than one possible answer), and to be as broadly educated as you can manage, so that you will have a rich network of ideas in which to locate the new concepts you will be exposed to in college.
You need more than a passive understanding of the math and science you have studied. Home-schooled students, especially, have too often read math and science books for understanding without practicing procedures sufficiently to “own” them, to be able to use them fluently and automatically as tools.
Finally, be prepared not to be the most competent student in your class all the time! Many of your classmates will also be going through an adjustment as they first encounter a class made up only of excellent students. Learn to take pleasure in the fact that you can seek help from some of your classmates. With your parents’ permission, you may want to get their phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
Assess your college readiness with the questionnaires in part 5 of this guidebook.
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