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June 15, 2009

Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers

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Excerpts: Excerpts From the Varied Writings of Mark Otuteye

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Latest Headlines In Europe, Skeptics of New 3-Year Degrees Abound As a deadline looms for universities participating in the Bologna Process to make their degrees compatible, many students and professors are expressing dissatisfaction with the program. Professors' Impact in NSF Science-Education Effort Proves Difficult to Gauge Q&A: The Problems Athletics-Compliance Officers Have With NCAA Rules NCAA Stands By Penalty Requiring Florida State to Forfeit Football Victories Peer Review: Business-School Dean Advanced From Chaos Theory to Global Marketing Furman U. Course Has Students Living as Thoreau Did

By JOSH KELLER

As a student at Stanford University, Mark Otuteye wrote in any medium he could find. He wrote blog posts, slam poetry, to-do lists, teaching guides, e-mail and Facebook messages, diary entries, short stories. He wrote a poem in computer code, and he wrote a computer program that helped him catalog all the things he had written.

But Mr. Otuteye hated writing academic papers. Although he had vague dreams of becoming an English professor, he saw academic writing as a "soulless exercise" that felt like "jumping through hoops." When given a writing assignment in class, he says, he would usually adopt a personal tone and more or less ignore the prompt.

"I got away with it," says Mr. Otuteye, who graduated from Stanford in 2006. "Most of the time."

The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.

Some scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands.

A new generation of longitudinal studies, which track large numbers of students over several years, is attempting to settle this argument. The "Stanford Study of Writing," a five-year study of the writing lives of Stanford students — including Mr. Otuteye — is probably the most extensive to date. (See box at end of article.)

In a shorter project, undergraduates in a first-year writing class at Michigan State University were asked to keep a diary of the writing they did in any environment, whether blogging, text messaging, or gaming. For each act of writing over a two-week period, they recorded the time, genre, audience, location, and purpose of their writing.

"What was interesting to us was how small a percentage of the total writing the school writing was," says Jeffrey T. Grabill, the study's lead author, who is director of the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center at Michigan State. In the diaries and in follow-up interviews, he says, students often described their social, out-of-class writing as more persistent and meaningful to them than their in-class work was.

"Digital technologies, computer networks, the Web — all of those things have led to an explosion in writing," Mr. Grabill says. "People write more now than ever. In order to interact on the Web, you have to write."

Kathleen Blake Yancey, a professor of English at Florida State University and a former president of the National Council of Teachers of English, calls the current period "the age of composition" because, she says, new technologies are driving a greater number of people to compose with words and other media than ever before.

"This is a new kind of composing because it's so variegated and because it's so intentionally social," Ms. Yancey says. Although universities may not consider social communication as proper writing, it still has a strong influence on how students learn to write, she says. "We ignore it at our own peril."

But some scholars argue that students should adapt their writing habits to their college course work, not the other way around. Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, cites the reading and writing scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which have remained fairly flat for decades. It is a paradox, he says: "Why is it that with young people reading and writing more words than ever before in human history, we find no gains in reading and writing scores?"

The Right Writing

Determining how students develop as writers, and why they improve or not, is difficult. Analyzing a large enough sample of students to reach general conclusions about how the spread of new technologies affects the writing process, scholars say, is a monumental challenge.

The sheer amount of information that is relevant to a student's writing development is daunting and difficult to collect: formal and informal writing, scraps of notes and diagrams, personal histories, and fleeting conversations and thoughts that never make it onto the printed page.

The Stanford study is trying to collect as much of that material as possible. Starting in 2001, researchers at the university began collecting extensive writing samples from 189 students, roughly 12 percent of the freshman class. Students were given access to a database where they could upload copies of their work, and some were interviewed annually about their writing experiences. By 2006 researchers had amassed nearly 14,000 pieces of writing.

Students in the study "almost always" had more enthusiasm for the writing they were doing outside of class than for their academic work, says Andrea A. Lunsford, the study's director. Mr. Otuteye submitted about 700 pieces of writing and became the study's most prolific contributor.

The report's authors say they included nonacademic work to better investigate the links between academic and nonacademic writing in students' writing development. One of the largest existing longitudinal studies of student writing, which started at Harvard University in the late 1990s, limited its sample to academic writing, which prevented researchers from drawing direct conclusions about that done outside of class.

In looking at students' out-of-class writing, the Stanford researchers say they found several traits that were distinct from in-class work. Not surprisingly, the writing was self-directed; it was often used to connect with peers, as in social networks; and it usually had a broader audience.

The writing was also often associated with accomplishing an immediate, concrete goal, such as organizing a group of people or accomplishing a political end, says Paul M. Rogers, one of the study's authors. The immediacy might help explain why students stayed so engaged, he says. "When you talked to them about their out-of-class writing, they would talk about writing to coordinate out-of-class activity," says Mr. Rogers, an assistant professor of English at George Mason University. "A lot of them were a lot more conscious of the effect their writing was having on other people."

Mr. Rogers believes from interviews with students that the data in the study will help show that students routinely learn the basics of writing concepts wherever they write the most. For instance, he says, students who compose messages for an audience of their peers on a social-networking Web site were forced to be acutely aware of issues like audience, tone, and voice.

"The out-of-class writing actually made them more conscious of the things writing teachers want them to think about," the professor says.

Mr. Otuteye, who recently started a company that develops Web applications, says he paid close attention to the writing skills of his peers at Stanford as the co-founder of a poetry slam. It was the students who took their out-of-class writing seriously who made the most progress, he says. "Everybody was writing in class, but the people who were writing out of and inside of class, that was sort of critical to accelerating their growth as writers."

Although analysis of the Stanford study is still at an early stage, other scholars say they would like to start similar studies. At the University of California, several writing researchers say they are trying to get financial support for a longitudinal study of 300 students on the campuses in Irvine, Santa Barbara, and Davis.

Curricular Implications

The implications of the change in students' writing habits for writing and literature curricula are up for debate. Much of the argument turns on whether online writing should be seen as a welcome new direction or a harmful distraction.

Mr. Grabill, from Michigan State, says college writing instruction should have two goals: to help students become better academic writers, and to help them become better writers in the outside world. The second, broader goal is often lost, he says, either because it is seen as not the college's responsibility, or because it seems unnecessary.

"The unstated assumption there is that if you can write a good essay for your literature professor, you can write anything," Mr. Grabill says. "That's utter nonsense."

The writing done outside of class is, in some ways, the opposite of a traditional academic paper, he says. Much out-of-class writing, he says, is for a broad audience instead of a single professor, tries to solve real-world problems rather than accomplish academic goals, and resembles a conversation more than an argument.

Rather than being seen as an impoverished, secondary form, online writing should be seen as "the new normal," he says, and treated in the curriculum as such: "The writing that students do in their lives is a tremendous resource."

Ms. Yancey, at Florida State, says out-of-class writing can be used in a classroom setting to help students draw connections among disparate types of writing. In one exercise she uses, students are asked to trace the spread of a claim from an academic journal to less prestigious forms of media, like magazines and newspapers, in order to see how arguments are diluted. In another, students are asked to pursue the answer to a research question using only blogs, and to create a map showing how they know if certain information is trustworthy or not.

The idea, she says, is to avoid creating a "fire wall" between in-class and out-of-class writing.

"If we don't invite students to figure out the lessons they've learned from that writing outside of school and bring those inside of school, what will happen is only the very bright students" will do it themselves, Ms. Yancey says. "It's the rest of the population that we're worried about."

Writing in electronic media probably does benefit struggling students in a rudimentary way, says Emory's Mr. Bauerlein, because they are at least forced to string sentences together: "For those kids who wouldn't be writing any words anyway, that's going to improve their very low-level skills."

But he spends more of his time correcting, not integrating, the writing habits that students pick up outside of class. The students in his English courses often turn in papers that are "stylistically impoverished," and the Internet is partly to blame, he says. Writing for one's peers online, he says, encourages the kind of quick, unfocused thought that results in a scarcity of coherent sentences and a limited vocabulary.

"When you are writing so much to your peers, you're writing to other 17-year-olds, so your vocabulary is going to be the conventional vocabulary of the 17-year-old idiom," Mr. Bauerlein says.

Students must be taught to home in on the words they write and to resist the tendency to move quickly from sentence to sentence, he says. Writing scholars, too, should temper their enthusiasm for new technologies before they have fully understood the implications, he says. Claims that new forms of writing should take a greater prominence in the curriculum, he says, are premature.

"The sweeping nature of their pronouncements to me is either grandiose or flatulent, or you could say that this is a little irresponsible to be pushing for practices so hard that are so new," Mr. Bauerlein says. "We don't know what the implications of these things will be. Slow down!"

Deborah Brandt, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies the recent history of reading and writing, says the growth of writing online should be seen as part of a broader cultural shift toward mass authorship. Some of the resistance to a more writing-centered curriculum, she says, is based on the view that writing without reading can be dangerous because students will be untethered to previous thought, and reading levels will decline.

But that view, she says, is "being challenged by the literacy of young people, which is being developed primarily by their writing. They're going to be reading, but they're going to be reading to write, and not to be shaped by what they read."

EXCERPTS FROM THE VARIED WRITINGS OF MARK OTUTEYE

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Section: The Faculty

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By Jennifer Goldstein

updated 8:15 a.m. ET, Fri., April 17, 2009

In the grand tradition of nutritional scapegoating, high fructose corn syrup has stepped into the spotlight as dietary enemy No. 1. It's an easy target. The corn-based sweetener is found throughout the American diet, in everything from sugary foods like soda and cookies to savory products like tomato sauce and salad dressing.

That's precisely the problem, say critics who blame the vast quantities we consume for the nation's soaring rates of obesity and diabetes.

But not everyone is convinced. Last June, the Corn Refiners Association launched an ad campaign telling the other side of the story — namely, that HFCS is "made from corn [and] has the same calories as sugar."

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The mixed messages have left consumers looking for answers. Prevention investigated — and found little conclusive evidence to confirm the anti-HFCS crusade.

Still, concerned researchers say there are reasons to keep your intake to a minimum. Here, we address the most common claims about HFCS and have experts weigh in so you can make the best choice for your health.

Proponents say:

Table sugar and HFCS have the same number of calories.

The verdict: "Gram for gram, table sugar and high fructose corn syrup are equal in calories," says Tanya Zuckerbrot, RD, a New York City-based nutritionist. They are also equally sweet. And both consist of two simple sugars — fructose and glucose — in roughly the same proportions (though the two sugars are merely blended together in HFCS, versus chemically bonded in sugar). Your body breaks down both products in virtually the same way, says Michael F. Jacobson, PhD, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. He adds, "There's no evidence that high fructose corn syrup is worse than sugar once it's in your body."

Still, we know much less about the long-term effects of HFCS than about those of sugar. HFCS was invented in the 1960s and has been used extensively in consumer products since only the late 1970s. "That's when an increase in the price of sugar helped make less expensive corn sweeteners more attractive to manufacturers," says Helen H. Jensen, PhD, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. It may be too soon to say that HFCS and sugar (which has been consumed safely for thousands of years) are the same.

Proponents say:

HFCS is natural.

The verdict: Natural is relative, so think of it this way: HFCS would not exist without the aid of humans. (Of course, neither would table sugar.) "You don't just squeeze it out of a kernel of corn," explains Jacobson. The sweetener is made from cornstarch via a process that alters corn's naturally occurring starch molecules. For that reason, Jacobson and CSPI protested an early version of the Corn Refiners Association ads that used the term natural in reference to HFCS. Eventually, he says, they took out the word "because it's not natural — it's highly processed."

Proponents say:

HFCS is responsible for the rise in obesity in our country.

The verdict: Manufacturers started using HFCS in the late '70s, right before America's collective waistline began to expand. Researchers have speculated that the relationship is more than a coincidence. However, a December 2008 supplement to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found no scientific support for the hypothesis that HFCS is causing obesity in the United States.

Some experts make an indirect case: HFCS, once much cheaper than sugar, cut the cost of sweet, calorie-dense foods, which fueled our sweet tooth — causing weight gain in the process.

Proponents say:

HFCS contributes to diabetes risk.

The verdict: "This notion that high fructose corn syrup is to blame for diabetes isn't exactly accurate," says Zuckerbrot. It probably gained traction alongside the obesity rumor. But we do know that excess calories — from any source — lead to weight gain, which plays a role in diabetes.

Interestingly, research suggests that a diet high in fructose (the sugar found naturally in fruit) may lead to leptin resistance, a hallmark of diabetes — and thanks to the ubiquity of HFCS, we are getting more fructose in our diets than ever before. Scientists are continuing to explore the possible link.

One clue that there's more to learn: In 2007, researchers at Rutgers University found that sodas sweetened with HFCS have high levels of compounds called reactive carbonyls, which are found in excess in the blood of people with diabetes and may contribute to tissue damage. "This brings up some interesting concerns, but we don't want to hang our hat on the results of one study," says American Dietetic Association spokesperson Lona Sandon, RD. Bottom line: More research needs to be done.

Proponents say:

HFCS contains mercury.

The verdict: Nearly half of the 20 HFCS samples tested in a recent study contained small amounts of potentially harmful mercury, according to a report in Environmental Health. While the Corn Refiners Association argues that the research was based on outdated information, another study by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy found that one-third of all HFCS-containing foods it bought in the fall of 2008 tested positive for the toxin. The researchers believe that HFCS is probably the source: A compound known as caustic soda, which is used to separate the corn starch from the kernel, can be tainted with mercury, and there's no way for you to know whether the caustic soda used was contaminated, according to study author David Wallinga, MD. Although much of the US production of caustic soda uses mercury-free technology, not all manufacturers worldwide have followed suit, adding fuel to the argument for minimizing HFCS intake.

Proponents say:

The FDA says that HFCS is safe to consume, so it must be.

The verdict: The FDA has ruled twice that HFCS is "safe" to consume. But the FDA also considers double bacon cheeseburgers safe — and you wouldn't want to eat those every day. Limiting HFCS (and other added sweeteners) does have one well-understood benefit: It will help you lose weight. And that will help prevent disease.

Jacobson agrees. Although the Corn Refiners Association is successfully pumping up the image of HFCS in the minds of many consumers, he believes that there's more the public should know. "The ads set the record straight about the similarities between sugar and high fructose corn syrup," he says. "But the responsible message should be 'Consume less of both.'"

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Change The Way You See Work and Change Your Life

Change the way you see work

Did you ever think there was a better, different way to live? Did you ever think, “Maybe I don’t have to go to a job and work 40+ hours a week, feel exhausted, wish for more time for myself or my family, and wonder when the fun stuff begins?” If so, get ready: your life’s about to change.

When I was a little girl, I woke up every morning with the sun. I opened my eyes, heard birds chirping outside my window, and smiled, thinking about the adventures of the coming day. Fast forward to my last corporate job, when I woke up with the alarm clock, slammed my hand down on the snooze button and laid in bed, a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, thinking about the eight hours I was about to spend working under fluorescent lights, in a small cubicle, so my boss could take credit for my work and someone else could profit.

Why do we do this to ourselves? When I look back on the time I spent in Corporate America, I realize that I didn’t know any better. Despite the entrepreneurial spirit I’ve felt through my entire life, there was a period of time when it simply didn’t occur to me that my life belonged to me and I didn’t have to live according to the narrow path that had been defined for me.

It took carpal tunnel syndrome and an inflexible corporate environment for me to realize that I desperately needed a change. And that’s what it took to remind me of the philosophy my dad taught me as a little girl, something I’d long forgotten: that work is what makes the rest of your life possible.

From this perspective, “work” takes on substantially less meaning, while “life” takes center stage. I like this because it reminds me where my priorities lie. I’d much rather my tombstone read, “She truly lived,” than “She worked a lot.”

It’s easy to say “work makes the rest of my life possible,” but how does it look in real life, and how do you put this into play in your own life?

How it looks in real life:

I wake up each morning, knowing that the day belongs to me. I have a schedule, but I’m not beholden to a boss or supervisor who will dock my pay or fire me if I decide the schedule doesn’t suit my mood that day. One of my priorities is my health and physical well-being, so most mornings I start my day off with a workout at the gym. Since my day is my own, I can work out without rushing, and that allows me to get to know the other members of my gym, which means it’s a social event as well.

Then, depending on the day and what I’ve committed to, I may work with clients, do some writing for my blog, e-zine, the book I’m working on, or the other sites I write for, or read one of the several books I’m into at any given moment. Aside from scheduled meetings with clients and deadlines, I do what suits my mood the best - if I’m struggling for inspiration for my articles, I spend more time reading. If I’m in the mood to bake bread with my husband, I do. And I’ve structured my businesses so that if I want to get on a plane and fly to South America, England, or New Orleans for a weekend or a month, I can do it without a second thought and my income doesn’t change a bit.

The point is, no day is completely consumed by work, it’s all flexible, and everything I do for “work” is something that I enjoy doing. If I don’t enjoy it, I either don’t do it or I find someone who does and I outsource that work to them.

When I speak to groups, I’m often asked, “How many hours a week do you work?” Sure, just like Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek (a great book to read if you want to get another, similar perspective on this philosophy), some weeks I only work four hours. But if I’m working on a book or one of my one-on-one clients is launching his/her business, I work at least forty. Those are the extremes: most weeks I stay somewhere in the twenty to twenty five hour range. But I can tell you this: I wake up with the sun and the birds chirping, just like I did when I was a little girl. I always wake up smiling, and I love what I do.

But I’m not that different from you. I’m not overly lucky and nothing that special has happened that made this possible for me. Virtually anyone can do this.

So how can you incorporate this into your own life?

The mindset comes first. You have to take responsibility for your life and know that it is yours to live in whatever way that you want. Think this is easy? It’s not. This can be one of the scariest things you’ll ever do. But as Seth Godin recently wrote, “the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe.” So take a risk and believe that your life belongs to you.

Second, figure out your priorities and your goals. What’s most important to you? Are there things you want to do, places you want to see? Maybe you just want more quality time with your family, or want more time to relax- that’s okay. The point is to figure out what’s most important to you.

Third, design a business to suit your lifestyle goals. This is the most challenging aspect of applying this philosophy, because it requires some extra knowledge- what opportunities are out there, how to repurpose what you already know and/or do, how to brand yourself and market your business. There is no one-size-fits-all solution- a business model that works for one person may not be suited to another. Your best bet, the easiest and fastest way to accomplish this, is to work with someone who has successfully made the transition themselves, who knows the opportunities out there, can help you figure out what suits you best, help you put it all together and show you the ropes.

Finally, be prepared to work to get to the point of living the dream. I’m not going to lie to you. It rarely happens overnight. Some of my clients have transitioned into this lifestyle (what I call the “Business in Blue Jeans lifestyle”) within a month or two, while others have taken a bit longer. Some of it depends on the industry you’re in and some depends on what you’re willing to put into it and how focused you are. Because the fact is, even though you aren’t working as much or as hard as before, in this lifestyle, when you are working, you need to be really focused.

Ultimately, the bottom line is that when you’re working for a life that you’ve designed, when you love what you’re doing and when you know that you aren’t just putting in the time, everything changes. Change the way you view work, and you’ll completely change your life.

Advice for Students: 11+ Ways to Make this Your Best Semester Yet

Right about now, America’s students are heading back to school for the Fall semester. Last week, I gave some very specific advice about using a wiki to store and organize notes, but keeping good notes is just part of being a successful student. Over the weekend, I decided to offer up some more general, all-purpose advice for students. Whether you’re just starting college or returning, the tips below will help you make the most out of the coming school year.

Get organized! Pretty self-explanatory, that one. But here’s a few things you an do to make that vague advice a little more practical:
- Write everything down. Get a Moleskine notebook and a packet of Post-It “Durable Tabs”. Divide the notebook into sections for your todo list, projects (stuff that takes more than a step or two to finish, e.g. research papers, club activities, etc.), and notes. Stick that and a nice pen or mechanical pencil in your pocket, purse, or backpack. Carry it everywhere. Use it. Religiously. Write down assignments, appointments, trips to the library, shopping lists, phone numbers, classroom numbers, everything and anything that crosses your mind. I keep todos on the right-hand page and notes on the back of the left-hand page. Or figure out some other system — use index cards, a DayPlanner, a PDA, whatever works, but use it.
- Review your lists regularly. Weekly, if you can. Bring your todo list up to date. Write down your upcoming deadlines. Copy your notes into a OneNote or EverNote file on your computer. Transfer email addresses and phone numbers into whatever software you use for contacts. Make sure you haven’t forgotten anything important, and brainstorm your ideas for the coming week.
- Have an inbox. Pick a place in your dorm room or apartment or wherever you end up living and put all your new stuff (assignments, papers, books, things you bought at the store) there. Go through it every day and put everything where it belongs — into your todo list, in a desktop file box, into whatever drawer or closet it belongs in.
Organized doesn’t necessarily mean “clean”, just keep a general system so you know that what you need is somewhere you can fin it. Remember that you need ideas, too — write them down and keep them safe!
Know your professor. Check out your professors’ bios on their departments’ websites. Google their names. (Use “firstname lastname” in quotes, then try “lastname, firstname”, also in quotes. Try with and without their middle initial, if you know it.) Look them up in whatever research databases your school’s library makes available to you. Look them up on Amazon. Pop in for a chat during their office hours. You don’t have to get creepy — don’t go through their garbage or anything like that. Just find out something about their work, what their research interests are, what sort of stuff they’ve written, what their teaching philosophy is (many profs post that kind of stuff). Find out where your interests intersect with theirs, and what they have to offer you that might be outside the scope of whatever class you’re taking.
Find a mentor. Seek out someone (or more than one, if you can) whose success as an academic, researcher, administrator, business person, artist, or writer inspires you. This may be a professor, but may well be someone outside the university altogether, too. Contact them. Tell them who you are and ask if you can meet with them some time. Offer to buy them a cup of coffee. Tell them why you admire them or their work, and ask if they have any advice for you. Offer our services as an intern or employee. Build a lasting relationship. You may well find a lot of jerks this way — stop admiring those people so much. Move on.
Visit the writing center. Or whatever other tutoring resources your school offers. Sign up for a writing workshop or study group. Take some flyers. Regardless of how well you think you write, you can always write better. Skilled writers are rare and in high demand — become one. Use whatever resources are at your disposal, including your school’s writing center. They’ll be more than glad to see you!
Join something. Join a club or sports team, a gaming group or a knitting circle. Join the theater group, or sign up to hand out environmental flyers in the student union. Nominate yourself (or ask someone to nominate you) for class president, or treasurer of whatever student group interests you. Check if your school offers a service learning program, and sign up. Volunteer. Develop leadership qualities by leading. Connect with as many people as you can, both because it’s smart networking and because it’s damn good fun. And you might change the world.
Speak up. Maybe you were shy in high school. I was. Stop that. When the professor asks a question, raise your hand — regardless of whether you know the answer or not. Give speeches in the student union or on the quad during lunch time. Step forward whenever the opportunity arises. Give presentations in class, even if there’s an alternate assignment. Join Toastmasters. Become a self-confident and able speaker.
Read for pleasure. No, seriously. This means two things: 1) learn to find pleasure in the reading you’re assigned, and 2) read stuff that isn’t assigned. Pick a topic that interests you and check out a book a week from the library. Read 10 novels this semester. Read literary magazines. Subscribe to RSS feeds, print out stories, and stuff them in your backpack for the random quiet moments that happen between classes, during meals, standing on line, or waiting for an appointment with a professor. Cultivate a thirst for knowledge above and beyond the subject matter of your classes.
Set goals. What do you hope to accomplish this semester? Forget about grades — grades are bunk. What is it that would satisfy you, as a person, if you achieve it this semester? What do you hope to get out of your classes? Make a list of goals, both short-term (this month, this semester, this class, before Thanksgiving, etc.) and long-term (during college, over the next year, within the next five years, etc.). Look at what you’re doing with your time; is it helping you reach those goals? Is it detracting from them? Of course, not everything has to contribute to helping you reach your goals for your life at 50, but if too much of what you do today seems to be at odds with where you want to be tomorrow, it’s time to re-examine either your goals or your actions.
Start something. Write a play or a novel. Organize a theater group or a weekly movie night. Curate an exhibition of your friends’ art work in the library’s lobby, or start a musical group and hit open-mike nights. If your school doesn’t have one, start a humor magazine; if it does have one, start a better one. Put together a rally at the book store opposing the use of sweatshop labor in school logo sweatshirts. Start a business delivering late-night snacks during study weeks.
Fail. While I realize you are firmly under the thumb of the tyranny of grades, and would not advise jeopardizing your GPA if you can help it, a little failure is often the best lesson you can learn, at school or elsewhere. Go out for activities you have no talent for, or that frighten you. Undertake Quixotic missions of protest against the administration, the school’s catering contractor, or the city government. Rally behind an unpopular candidate, whether for class secretary or for US Senator. Ask out a student that’s way out of your league. Apply for a job you have no qualifications for — without irony. Push yourself to do things that are well beyond your comfort level, if for no other reason than to assess the distance you’d have to cover to succeed at them.
Find balance. When mid-terms are done, have a drink (assuming that’s legal). Call home. Hang out. Play guitar. Schedule goofing off time, if you have to — you’re not only earning the right to waste time, but you need to if you’re to be at all successful. Remember, you’re here to grow as a person, and that means doing things that are personally satisfying even if they don’t come with a grade, paycheck, or certificate attached. Figure out now how to balance work and play, because it’s going to be easier now than when you’ve got bills up to your backside, screaming kids, and a micro-managing boss looking over your shoulder.

Bonus tip: Keep reading lifehack.org for advice and tips throughout the school year.

Bonus tip two: Know yourself. Learn your strengths and apply them. Learn your weaknesses and overcome them. College offers a unique time in your life when you can focus exclusively on self-improvement and personal development. Take advantage of it.

Obviously you won’t want to do every single thing I’ve mentioned here, but use these tips as a guide to build relationships, skills, and self-awareness, ostensibly the things you’re in school for (well, that and the beer, but I think you know where to find that already, right?).

What advice do you have for the students of 2007-8? If you’re in school, what have you figured out that works for you? If you’re out of school, what did you come up with to make your college years as productive as possible? And what are the problems and challenges facing today’s students? What secret do you wish someone would just come out and say, already?

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So how can you incorporate this into your own life?

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