So, you decided to attend post-secondary. Here’s how it will look: one week you’re coasting along, scrolling through seals dancing to Eminem during lectures, all the while crushing weekly quizzes and getting 95 percents. The very next week you’re pulling brutal week-long study sessions where your responsibilities, hobbies, and life outside your multi-page essay on Lithuanian fork design becomes a hazy, irrelevant memory. And how does it all end? With a meagre C- because the fourth sentence in the second paragraph didn’t follow the exact formatting an English major cobbled together 15 years ago after downing one too many energy drinks.
Welcome to Camosun College.
Whether you’re coming back to class because your gap year devolved into a hazy bender of YouTube character analyses, pizza nights, and long-winded internal debates; you’re a recent graduate coming for a post-grad certificate to land that job that has endless requirements; you’re someone who realized after two years that their major sucks; or you’re even a bored retiree coming to take jazz to wow your golf pals, I, Matias Li, have three universal tips that I hope can help you overgrown teenag… err, students, whoever you may be.
Tip one: never underestimate a course. Post-secondary is not purely a test of how good or talented you are on a subject; courses test you on your professional procedure and your persistence as much as your talent. This advice applies even if a course is taken as an elective or you did well in that subject in high school. No matter the course, you always should make sure you have a partial grasp of the lecture’s content within 48 hours. Write your own notes while rereading slides, listen to recordings at the gym; whatever study methods are up your alley, make sure to have a 30 percent understanding of the lecture content within two days. Even if you feel like all you’ve absorbed are garbled fragments of an alien language, the logical structures will be recorded by your brain, making future study sessions far more effective.
Tip two: professional study help is around the corner, figuratively and literally. Camosun offers myriad free study services for students, including the Writing Centre, Math Help Centre, Ask a Librarian, and Learning Skills Services. These centres hook you up with professionals and they help you go through complex content judgement free (they already deal with dozens of us brain-melted students every day). Furthermore, if you can’t attend in-person sessions, you can book online help sessions. Just send them the material you are struggling with, and your deep-fried brain will thank you as you blow through that one gnarly trigonometry problem or essay paragraph that stitched your butt to a half-broken chair for five hours.
Tip three: Register for the plans and discounts that the Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) offers to students. The CCSS not only gets you discounts across Greater Victoria, from Rexall to Chicken Hub, but they also offer deals that cut the costs of many health and wellness services by more than half. The CCSS not only lets you to buy two chicken hub special burgers instead of one, but they also help ease your financial worries, allowing you to be all burgered-up and ready to crush that Lithuanian fork essay.
The Camosun experience isn’t about becoming modern Confucius; it’s about time management, persistence, and knowing when to call for help before your fingers fuse with your pen. You will miss deadlines, misread assignment guidelines, and question your life choices at 4 am every now and then. But you’ve got this. Now go get on your weekly quiz’s slides, and kick some academic ass.