8 Things I Did RIGHT as a Student
- If you can't tell by the abrupt set change, I have moved.
I am currently in the process of building a new studio.
But right now, it's, well, kind of a mess. Bear with me for a while.
I've got this temporary set for a couple of days. Once I get this video out, I will have time
to build a proper set once again.
But in the meantime, we got to talk about some things
that I did right in college.
Now a few months ago, I did a video called eight mistakes
that I made as a student.
That is a pretty big number of mistakes.
I certainly made more than that.
But I also did a few things right.
Today, to create a complement to that video,
I wanted to go through eight things
that I think that I did correctly as a student
and I think that you might want to apply
a few of these lessons to your own life
if you are a student.
Some of these might even be applicable to you
even if you're not a student. Let's get into them. All right.
The first thing that I want to go ahead
and pat my 18-year-old self on the back for
is taking jobs that existed outside
of my area of focus or my major.
Now when I went into college, I majored in something called
management information systems,
which is basically the IT major.
My goal originally was to become a network technician.
I was looking for jobs specifically in the IT area.
My first job in college was actually working
for the campus tech support department
where I removed virus from people's computers and took support calls and answered emails
and basically told people to turn it off and on again.
- Have you tried turning it off and on again?
- But during that same exact year,
I also got a job that was, at my school,
called being a Cyclone aide
because we were the Iowa State Cyclones.
This job was basically working
as a student orientation assistant.
During the summer, I gave campus tours,
I stood in front of tons of parents and students
and answered all kinds of questions
about the college experience.
I also helped set up
basically the entire freshman orientation program.
We booked speakers, we set up event areas.
It was a job where I had to wear a lot of hats.
I also think it was the most useful part-time job
that I worked in college.
Now I did all kinds of other stuff as well.
I worked as a web developer both freelance and employed.
I was an RA.
I had lots of other jobs on the side.
But that job in particular gave me leadership skills,
gave me communication skills
both interpersonal communication skills
and in the realm of public speaking.
In general, it made me, forced me
to become a more organized person.
These qualities, organize, leadership,
and communication and lots of others,
employers are looking for these qualities
in addition to domain-specific experience.
Yes, your major is important
and getting experience in that major area
is something that I definitely recommend you do
as soon as you possibly can.
But also be looking for other jobs and experiences
that give you the opportunity
to build those other qualities.
They're really, really important. Secondly, I got really, really serious
about using my calendar correctly during my freshman year.
This was something that was forced on me
because right when I came into college,
I got a job at the campus IT center like I just said
and every single week, this free-for-all calendar of hours
would open up.
It was a first come, first served thing.
If you were there, the moment the calendar opened up,
you could get whatever hours you wanted.
You can tailor it around your class schedule,
which was awesome.
But if you waited too long,
usually we're just picking the scraps and working midnight shifts or 7:30 a.m. shifts,
which those are okay for me,
but still it was nice to have choice.
The moment that I would grab a slot on that work calendar,
I would go and replicate that work slot
on my personal Google calendar.
This was really important because my work schedule
is changing every single week as a result
and I also had a pretty complicated class schedule.
But that wasn't all I was doing with my calendar. The tip that I want to share with you here
was something I started doing really early on,
which was looking ahead at the academic calendar
and at other calendars for organizations
and other things like that
and putting events on my calendar well in advance.
For example, I went and found the date
at which I can sign up for the next semester's classes and I got that on my calendar
and made sure I was awake and ready to sign up for classes
the moment I could.
Again, it was a first come, first served thing.
I wanted to be first.
All right.
Item number three on the list, I optimized my time
and my schedule for extracurriculars
rather than a heavy course load.
Now there are gonna people in the comments
who are really gung-ho about double majoring.
I'm sure many people have had a great experience of doing so or compressing their classes into fewer semesters
so they could cut the cost of college.
But for me, I viewed college
as a concentrated bundle of opportunities.
I was basically placing myself in a geographical space
where there is just all kinds of opportunity around me.
I realized that classes
weren't the only kind of opportunities. I knew that if I dedicated some of my time
towards extracurriculars, towards participating in clubs
and being in the leadership boards of those clubs,
towards personal projects like building my website
College Info Geek, which eventually became my career,
or even part-time jobs on campus, I knew that I would get
a much more well-rounded experience in college.
Plus, I knew that employers were looking
for real-world experience.
They were looking for impressive projects
where the student took initiative.
You can get those in classes,
but you can get a lot more of them outside of class.
I think that it's a good idea to have a balance between coursework and extracurriculars.
Now we move on to item number four.
It's a brand new John Cena poster from my door, of course. Actually item number four was that I kept applying
for scholarships all throughout my college career.
Now a lot of high schoolers go really hard
on the scholarship application train
up until they get to college.
A lot of people think that scholarships
are something that you worry about
when you're in high school and then you don't worry about funding once you're in your university experience, but there are a lot of scholarships out there
for current college students
and even for graduate students.
In fact, I won far more scholarships
during my college career
than I ever did in high school.
During college, I won
two different entrepreneurship scholarships,
one I think was from my freelance website business,
and then the second one later on was for College Info Geek.
Aside from those, which obviously did involve
a lot of extracurricular work,
I also applied for general college or business scholarships
where I just had to fill out a basic application
and I won a couple off of that as well.
I think that it would be advisable to follow the path
that my 19 and 20 and 21-year-old self took.
Keep applying for scholarships
all throughout your educational career.
Unless the funding is completely taken care of,
you owe it to yourself to do it.
All right.
Item number five, as often as I could,
I introduced myself to my new professors
and teacher assistants at the beginning
of each semester's classes and I also went to office hours. I didn't just go to office hours to ask for help. I would occasionally drop by office hours
just to chat with the professor
because I wanted to build relationships.
Now looking back on all those efforts,
I don't have ongoing relationships with every single professor that I ever had in college,
but I do still stay in contact
with a few of them every now and then.
A lot of really good stuff
came out of those relationships as well.
Some of them were happy to write letters of recommendation
for internships and scholarships when I asked them
because they knew me and they knew a little bit of my work.
I was even invited to speak at the classes
of a couple of them after I graduated from college.
I know this takes a little bit of effort,
but everything worth doing does.
Whenever you start a new semester,
make it a point to at least introduce yourself
to your professors and try to build that relationship.
All right.
Item number six, which might be
a bit of a controversial item, but I at least stand by it.
I chose to live on campus in the dorms
for my first two years of college.
I have this decision on the list
because it wasn't my original plan. Back when I was in high school,
I had plans to get an off-campus apartment
with one of my friends from high school.
We were both gonna get part-time jobs on campus.
We were just gonna pay the monthly rent to live off-campus,
which was a little bit cheaper than the dorms
and which would have allowed us to pay monthly
rather than all upfront each semester.
That was big because we didn't want to take on loans. I had this entirely debt-free mindset going into college,
which is why I was gonna move three miles off-campus.
I was gonna get the part-time job, all of that stuff.
But then during the summer leading up to my freshman year,
I decided to go and read every college prep book
my public library had.
One of those books was The Naked Roommate by Harlan Cohen.
I remember one of the pieces of advice in that book
being to live on campus for at least the first year.
His justification for that was that it puts you
in the middle of the action.
All the opportunities are so much closer to you.
There's an event on campus, you don't have to do the mental calculus of whether or not it's worth it to drive 30 minutes there and back,
all that kind of stuff.
You were just there.
Also, if you live in the dorms,
you can have your door open all the time.
A lot of people will just end up wandering in.
That's how you make friends. I took that book's advice. Yes, I did end up taking a couple of student loans
to make that work.
In hindsight, I probably could have paid for it
with part-time job earnings anyway.
So, I would count that as a little bit of a mistake.
But I'm very glad I lived on campus. I met friends who are still some of my best friends today.
That book was right.
I was placed right in the middle of the action.
At the drop of a hat, I could go take advantage
of an opportunity, which I did many, many times.
Now again, I realize this particular tip
might be controversial both for the financial aspect of it
and for the fact that many campuses do things differently.
My campus was a very insular environment.
Some campuses are just in the middle of cities.
It makes sense to get an apartment
that isn't affiliated with your school. The lesson that I really want to share here
isn't to make sure you're living in on-campus dorms per se, but it's to do whatever you can to put yourself in the middle of the action.
Put yourself as close to the potential opportunities
as you can especially during that first and second year
when you haven't really figured out what you want to do, you haven't made as many friends yet, you're still trying to establish yourself. Item number seven,
which is quite related to item number six,
I was constantly keeping my eye out for opportunities.
A lot of the buildings on my campus had bulletin boards
that I was constantly looking at.
I also went and proactively followed
a lot of the on-campus departments and clubs
on Twitter and Facebook.
I kept tabs on the things that were going on.
But I didn't just keep tabs mentally. What I want to share here is to keep an eye out
for opportunities but then put them on your calendar.
If you're not sure whether or not you want to do them or if you have time, just mark them as TBA.
Maybe even put them on a specific calendar
for on-campus events.
That way, on a day-to-day basis,
you can go and look at what's going on on your personal calendar where it's all nice and collected and decide whether or not
you can actually make it
to the things that you put on that calendar.
All right.
Finally, number eight, I went to every single career fair
that I could.
I put this item on the list
because I remembered distinctly during my freshman year,
a lot of my friends said, "I don't need to go "to the career fair this year because I'm only planning "on getting an internship after my sophomore year, "after my second year of college. "What's the point of going to the career fair now? "It's just a waste of my time." But I saw it differently.
I too only intended to get an internship
after my sophomore year because I was doing
that student orientation job the summer
after my freshman year.
But I wanted to go to the career fair
to meet people as early as I could
because I figured if I met recruiters
during my freshman year,
then I would go to the career fair
during my sophomore year again and they would recognize me.
The more they recognized me,
the more rapport we established,
the higher up I was probably going to be on the shortlists
of the hiring managers that they talk to.
Additionally, going to every single career fair
meant that I was getting a lot more practice
talking with recruiters, pitching myself,
telling them what I wanted to do, what my skills were,
what my experience was.
This is difficult when you don't have a lot of practice doing it.
By going to every single career fair,
every single networking event that you have access to
within your major and otherwise,
you're gonna get a lot of practice. Even if you end up talking with recruiters at companies
that you don't really care about, you're gonna one, make a connection, but two, you're gonna get practice that will be applicable for the recruiters and the companies
that you really do care about.
My suggestion is to go to every career fair that you can
even if you aren't intending to get a job or an internship for a couple of years.
It's just good practice. Now in the first tip of this video,
I talked about a few of the qualities
that hiring managers and recruits are looking for
beyond simple major-level or domain-level experience,
things like organizational skills or communication ability.
In addition to those,
these hiring managers are also looking for things
like adaptability and problem-solving skills.
They want to know if you can independently apply yourself
to a new and novel problem and solve it
because if you can, then you're advantage their business and they're probably gonna want to hire you. Luckily, problem-solving and adaptability,
these are traits that you can learn
and get better at through practice.
If you're looking for a great resource for building those skills, you should check out Brilliant.
Brilliant is an excellently designed learning platform
for anyone who wants to improve their abilities
in the areas of math, science, and to computer science.
What I love about Brilliant
is they approach their course design process
with the principle of acting learning in mind.
This means that from the moment you start
one of their in-depth courses,
you are gonna be solving the problems.
You won't be sitting back passively in taking information, you're gonna have to sink your teeth into something that you might get stuck on.
Now these problems are bite-sized.
They're not designed to frustrate you, but they are designed to keep your interest level high
and they're also designed to improve your problem-solving skills along the way.
Within their library, you're gonna find a ton of different courses that you can take
from calculus to statistics, to waves and light
to even computer science fundamentals.
But this year, they also launched a new feature
called daily problems.
This is a section of the website where every single day,
they publish a few new problems in broad areas for you
to sink your teeth into such as this one
on whether or not sound travels farther in the cold
or this one where you have to figure out
what happens if you cut a Mobius strip in half.
These problems don't take up a whole lot of your time. They're great for building a daily learning habit. Most importantly, they're from a broad array of subjects. If you're stuck within a couple of subjects within their in-depth courses,
this can be a great feature for expanding your horizons
and maybe finding something new
that you might be interested in.
If you want to try your hand
with some of those daily problems
or get into one of their in-depth courses,
then go over to brilliant.org/thomasfrank and just sign up.
If you're one of the first 83 people who does so, you're also gonna get 20% off their annual premium subscription.
Big thanks to Brilliant for sponsoring this video
and being a huge supporter of my channel
and the work that I do.
As always, guys, thank you so much for watching.
If you like this video,
definitely hit that like button,
so more people can find this channel.
You can also subscribe right there
if you want to get new videos
every single week when they come out.
You can also click right there
to get a free copy of my book on how to earn better grades.
Watch one more video on this channel right over here
or follow me on Instagram @tomfrankly.
Thanks for watching. I will see you guys in the next one.
Bye.