Aphorisms for Students

Your professors can make you a good engineer, a good historian, or a good reader of ancient Greek; they can’t make you a good person. Some will try. They will fail because there is no necessary connection between mental and moral strength.

The following statements are designed to make you a good student, but not a good person. If the latter happens, it is purely accidental, but also entirely beneficial.

Be kind and work hard: good things will happen.

Sit in one of the front corners of the classroom: for some reason (I don’t know why) my most interesting students always sit in one of the front corners. They know they need to be close to the action – to make themselves memorable and keep themselves involved – but they have enough integrity that they dare not be seen as goody-two-shoes-ish. Don’t sit in the middle of the classroom: that’s where forgettable students flock to be overlooked. Be careful with the back of the classroom: that’s where delinquents dwell to distract you. Sit in the center of the front row if you must.

In high school, the institution had a legal obligation to save you from yourself when you wanted to sabotage your own education. In college, you have the freedom to fail: from you professor’s perspective, that’s just one less paper he or she has to grade, which allows us to focus our energy on the students that deserve it.

If there is discussion involved in a course, force yourself to say something within the first two weeks. If you don’t, you’re likely to get labeled (by yourself and others) as someone who doesn’t contribute, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Your professor would rather have you e-mail him/her too much than not enough. I’ve never in my career been annoyed by someone who e-mailed me reminding me to do something.

Make eye contact and nod when your professors lecture. Don’t break eye-contact when your professor looks at you, especially if he or she has just asked the class a question that no one can or wants to answer.

Make time to study. Create a schedule, and stick to it. No one writes a good paper in one night.

Study every day. Allow yourself very few days without studying, and select them wisely (holidays, special events, etc.); even 30 minutes keeps your mind active and in good academic shape.

Study routine matters in groups.

At the same time, have a place where the only thing that occurs is silent and private study. In this place, you don’t eat, sleep, socialize, play games, surf the web, masturbate, have sex, or do drugs. You only study, and you (and your friends) know that, when you go to this place, you’re there to study.

Go to office hours.

Introduce yourself to your professors. Make yourself a person to them, rather than a function of the teaching exercise.

When you see a professor on campus, say hello and remind him or her how he or she knows you: “Hello Professor Wilson. My name’s Jeff. I was in your Renaissance drama class.”

Except by computers on little bubble sheets, there’s no such thing as objective grading (and even on bubble sheets there’s room to debate the bias of questions).

Be a joiner. College is about belonging to communities. Join things. If your school doesn’t have a club for the activity you want to celebrate, create one, and watch them join in droves.

Ask questions in class. As a rule, if one student has a question about the material, at least three others have the same question, even if your question is, “Huh?” You don’t have to know what you don’t understand, or why you don’t understand it; you just have to let your professor know that it doesn’t make sense. In all likelihood, he or she has heard your question 1,000 times before and knows exactly what’s not clicking.

Be interested and be interesting. After all our debates about God, truth, knowledge, history, science, and so forth have come back inconclusive, one ethical imperative will remain: be interested in other people and their actions, and do interesting things. Practice an ethics of curiosity.

There is an ethics of presence, of being there. Show up to things. It’s all about showing up, whatever state you’re in. Just be present.

Support others in their bizarre, idiosyncratic activities and they will support you in yours.

Attend to actions, not people. What we do is who we are. There’s no such thing as a “good person” or a “bad person”; there are “good actions” and “bad actions,” and anyone is capable of either. You will set yourself up to be proven a fool the moment you think you know what someone will do because you think you know who someone is. We aren’t anything; we just do.

Take risks with your own life, but not with the lives of others.

Alcohol and drugs will happen, whether to you or your friends. Limit illegality. Know your campus resources and use them.

The phone number for campus health services is:

The phone number for campus mental health services is:

The phone number for the campus police is:

If you’re not sure whether or not you should call 911, call 911.

Studying abroad will be the single most important experience of your college years.

Learn to love. You serve what you love. Ask yourself who or what you serve, who or what you give your time and energy to without expecting or demanding compensation: family, friends, community, God, money, nothing. That’s who or what you love.

Thank professors.

You can’t be the best (or even good) at everything, but you should find something you love to do and do it better than anyone else does.

Think of the things others do that make you happy, then do those things for others.

Prepare to change. You will not be the same person at the end of college that you were at the start. If you are, you’ve failed. Don’t fear maturity: life is about becoming the person you used to make fun of.

Be intellectually responsive to the accidents of your life. One of the most important aspects of becoming an intellectual is developing your own perspective and voice – that which makes your ideas valuable because they are distinct and unique. Be sure to give intellectual rigor to the things that happen to you.

Don’t be cynical. Any idiot off the street can point out what’s wrong with a situation, and it takes an even lesser form of scum to mock insufficiency. It takes true intelligence and wisdom to recognize when something is good and pleasant. If you are lucky enough to recognize goodness and pleasure, tell as many people about them as you can.

The hardest course you had in high school will be easier than the easiest course you’ll have in college.

Take notes. They help you remember in three ways: (1) Immediately, since the information passes through your mind twice as much (not only your mind’s “input” but also its “output”); (2) For the test or paper, when you need details; and (3) Later in school or life, when you want to recall what was said in a course (this last point is especially important if you see yourself in some sort of career in education: yes, you must know the material, but it also helps to see how someone else taught the material).

Copy the board. It may not seem so to you, but time flies in class. From your professor’s perspective, there’s never enough time in class to get through all the material he or she needs to cover that day. If your professor takes valuable class-time to write something on the board, copy it exactly, because it’s very important.

If your professor says “always” or “never,” it’s either a lie or the most important thing that’ll be said all term.

Don’t doodle. Certainly don’t draw me.

You’re not fooling anyone when put your cell phone on your lap under the table to text. There are only two things you could be doing down there, and you’re not allowed to do either.

You know it if you can teach it. As often as possible, explain the world you encounter out on the street to your family and friends based on the knowledge you’ve taken from your classes. Do the opposite in grad school, though, since your interests and explanations will be so specialized that they are likely to fascinate only you and your colleagues, and you’ll be dejected when everyone at the Thanksgiving table isn’t as excited about, say, the Italianate form of Milton’s sonnets as you are.

As Peter Parker tells us, with great power comes great responsibility. Opportunity and talent obligate effort.

There is no God, unless there is. Like all people, professors practice various versions of spirituality, but as far as the university is concerned, there is no God, unless you attend a religious institution, in which case there is no “there is no God.”

Get enough sleep. Everything else depends on it.

You will learn more in your first year of graduate school than in any other year of your life.