(中文翻译: http://zhi.hu/Zmc9. Thank you @Cielo SHEN for your awesome translation! )
For undergraduate students,
Structure your funJoin a club or sports team with regular activities. You spend less time sitting around if you have a schedule for your fun.
Lead the troopsDon't wait for someone else to organize something fun for you to do; find something exciting and convince others to join you. As a bonus, you'll also learn leadership, organization and marketing skills.
Travel for workLook for an internship in a different state or country. That way, you don't have to travel extra to visit a new place.
Increase your studying efficiency
Find out what's on the tests before the test. Look for sample exams or practice exams and do all the problems. Then go to office hours and ask the professor for explanations on every single practice exam problem. Two things will happen: you'll either receive amazing answers or you'll learn that "This question isn't on the test."
EDIT:I've received criticism that learning the test, instead of learning the material, is a shortcut to failure in the long-run. I think this depends on whether the classes and tests are teaching useful material. For example, I value learning a process or a method of analysis over memorizing facts; so if a class focuses on rote memorization without application, I look for ways to pass the tests and spend my time practicing other things. Yes, I learn less of what's taught in class, but I'm deliberately making that trade-off.This method also has a real-life analogy. Say I decide one day that I want to learn how to direct animated movies. Do I read textbooks on film studies and animation and watch all the famous animes? Probably not; that sounds overwhelming. Instead, I'd find my favorite director, Hayao Miyazaki, and ask him about all the decisions he's made in making his animated films. I'd make small animated films and show it to him. And some of the most important knowledge he could impart on me is, "Don't do this, because..." The number of things I need to master just shrunk by one.In my college experience, I found that there was more to experience outside a college classroom than in one. Many of those experiences weren't academic, but provided opportunities to practice real skills, such as leadership, collaboration, organization, tolerance, marketing, public speaking, networking, etc. Whether a student values these intangible skills over the facts taught in class is a personal decision. However, because these extracurricular activities were generally less structured compared to classes, I found that it took more effort than studying for class. Ironically, I sometimes did homework because I was feeling lazy and didn't want to work on a harder problem.On another note, if some people think that it's counterproductive for college students to focus on having fun because the "main responsibility" of a student is to study, then these detractors are foreign to the student culture at American universities. Fun is a fundamental pillar of the undergraduate experience. It makes perfect sense to me that a college student would want to study less, get better grades and have more fun.
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美国留学要注意什么？ |
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