College Success - Five Surefire Ways to Succeed in College Beyond Just Studying

Succeeding in college requires more than just studying your course content. Here are five tips that will help you navigate successfully through college.

Learn teachers' personalities, preferences and policies. Then use what you learn to plan your study time.

My botany teacher in my first year of college loved to give us definitions and on tests wanted them regurgitated back with every word and comma in the exact places as her original. It would have certain failure to summarize the definitions in your own words, so studying for her tests meant memorizing with great detail and practicing writing those definitions over and over. Not an admirable teaching approach, but that was her style.

Pay attention to gestures, body language, word choice, but especially the concepts they emphasize. If a teacher says "...and most important..." the next thing the teacher says is destined to appear on a test.

If a history teacher spends a disproportionate amount of time lecturing and discussing World War II, this is a big clue that this is an era he favors. Even on essay tests you can bet he's going to lean toward this war.