College Style – How Do You Perceive It?

The transitioning from high school to college requires lots of information to fully adjust to college style. You must understand that there are differences between high-school and college experience. Most colleges assign teachers, most especially psychology teachers to help students understand that life in college is different from what they were used to in high school.

Helping Students To Adapt To College

Image of a student studying hard for the exam

We have put together a 3-stage strategy that will help students adapt quickly and easily in their freshman year in college.

1. The first stage is to let the students know that things will be different from how it was for them in high school. There professors and classes will be different from their teachers and classes in high school. For example, college work is harder, must be completed over a short period of time and majority of it is not done within the school environment. Knowing this will get you prepared for the challenge.
2. Stage two is the KSAs (knowledge, skills, and attitudes) stage. This stage is to help the students discover and value the KSAs because it is what they will be needing to adapt to their new environment. For instance, they must be aware of the resources the college offers (such as academic advising, the library, and the writing center), the skills required to cope in classes (e.g., to be willing to accept the responsibility for their learning and to accept an active attitude towards their education).
3. The last stage is to keep them engaged with activities and assignments designed to strengthen or develop these KSAs.

Identifying these academic differences and tweaking your lifestyle by merging the wisdom of specialists in your field and the experience you have gathered from interacting with other freshmen will help you adapt quickly to college life. Below are some perceived differences between college classes and high school classes.

College Classes Vs. High School Classes

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  Teenage students learning in classroom with their teacher

  A lot of reading is required in college, while for high school, you barely read much to succeed

• It doesn’t take much to pass high school classes, but you must work harder to be able to succeed in college
• College classes requires critical research and in depth compare to what you get in high school classes

Another important factor that differentiates high school from college is “Time”. As a college student, you need to learn how to assimilate quickly and to complete a bulky task on time. It is different from what you had in high school and you must be prepared to adapt to this lifestyle.

College Professors Vs. High School Teachers

There are also differences between college professors and high school teachers, the most vital of which focused on the fact that college dons expect more from their students and want them to be responsible partners in the learning-teaching process. You have to be intense in your reading, not limiting yourself to only what you get in the classroom.

In high school, your teachers will what is due the next day. This is not so for college professors. They expect you to go through the syllabus yourself to know what’s due.

Also, college professors don’t tell you what to do, they assume you know what is expected of you. But for high school teachers, they will tell you what is expected of you over and over again.

A College Professor teaches students

Most of the knowledge you derive while in college are mainly self-thought because you don’t wait for your teacher to come put you through that textbook. You go through it yourself and through that process, develop your mental faculty.

So from all these facts, we can deduce that life in college is more intense than what is experienced in high school. You have to brace up yourself and drop your high school mentality in order to cope well in college. You can also see more on 10 basics every high-school graduate must know about college.