Getting the Best Out of College: A Professor, A Dean, And A Student Tell You How to Maximize Your Experience

YOUR REAL FRESHMAN ORIENTATION GUIDE

After years of standardized tests, group projects, community service, and high school woes, you’ve finally made it to college. So, what now?

Answering the all-too-familiar groan “I wish I’d known that as a freshman,” a prof, a dean, and a recent grad distill more than fifty years of expertise at top colleges into this crash-course guide to success. Proving that it matters less where you go than what you accomplish while you’re there, they reveal secrets that most undergrads learn the hard way (if at all), such as how to impress professors, live with roommates, select the best courses, plan your major, prepare for life in the real world, and more.

College is a huge investment of time, money, and yourself. Getting the Best Out of College is essential to making the most of that investment.

Peter D. Feaver (PhD, Harvard, 1990) is the Alexander F. Heh-meyer Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University. He has over twenty years of teaching experience–as a teaching fellow at Harvard and as a professor at Duke. He won the Harvard Certificate of Distinction in Teaching (1985—86 and 1986—87), the Trinity College (Duke) Distinguished Teaching Award (1994—95), and the Duke Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award (2001). He has published numerous scholarly books and articles on national security issues, and he has served on the National Security Council at the White House, first as Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control under President Bill Clinton and most recently as Special Advisor for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform under President George W. Bush. As long as his knees will let him, he can be found waddling up and down the basketball court–or more often these days, cheering his daughter and two sons from the sidelines.

Sue Wasiolek (more commonly known as Dean Sue) is assistant vice president for student affairs and dean of students at Duke University. She was premed at Duke (she never got into medical school), completed a Master’s of Health Administration at Duke (only worked in health care for eighteen months), completed her JD at North Carolina Central University and her LLM at Duke (only practiced law for nine months), and has been working at Duke for the past twenty-eight years. Sue loves the classroom both as a teacher (she teaches edu-cation law) and as a student (she plans to complete her EdD in 2008). Sue encourages students to study what they love and base their careers around what they love, even if those two are totally different things. Her time with students is not a job but a way of life. In her free time, Sue can be found jogging around Durham or working out at the gym with students.

Anne Crossman studied at both Stanford and Duke, earning a BA in English and a Certificate in Education. After teaching for public high schools, colleges, and the military for five years, she gave up her day job to pursue authorship and motherhood. A poet by trade, her work has been published in journals such as Nimrod and Margie, and she is currently finalizing a book of poems about Alzheimer’s disease entitled Trying to Remember, which is due to be published the summer of 2008. Her third book, a humorous educational series addressing life as a high-school student, is on deck and, if all goes well, will be hitting shelves by the end of the decade. Anne currently lives with her husband and sons in Seattle, Washington.