This Book Is Not Required

An Emotional and Intellectual Survival Manual for Students

Inge Bell, Bernard D. McGrane, John A. Gunderson, Terri Lynne Anderson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781483321158
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This Fifth Edition of the underground classic This Book Is Not Required: An Emotional and Intellectual Survival Manual for Students breaks new ground in participatory education, offering insight and inspiration to help undergraduates make the most of their college years. This edition continues to teach about the college experience as a whole—looking at the personal, social, intellectual, technological, and spiritual demands and opportunities—while incorporating new material highly relevant to today's students. The material is presented in a personable and straightforward manner, maintaining Dr. Inge Bell's illuminating writing style throughout, and invites students to take responsibility for, and make the most of, their educational experiences.

Part I Academics and Learning

Chapter 1 Welcome to College

In Chapter 1, we explore the phenomenon of being a stranger in a strange new land and attempt to encourage you to really listen to what some already established, well experienced “natives” pointedly suggest, coming from their own experience. In particular, we will explore the following topics:

• The transition from high school to college.
• Opportunities and challenges that students typically face as they enter the academy and face the unknown.
• Some remarkably effective strategies to personally consider.
• Some ways students can discover and uncover their own personal academic passions.
• The special opportunities and strategies faced by nontraditional students.

“Welcome to” is a message we are all familiar with. Most of us see these words on signposts around our hometowns and don't pay much attention. However, when we embark on a journey, these signs take on new meaning and indicate we are entering a foreign land filled with new culture, new customs, new ideas, and new vocabulary. As most travelers know, even the most ordinary necessities can be hard to find in a new location if you don't know how to ask or where to look. These disconcerting situations can range from silly and embarrassing to dangerous or life threatening. Luckily, most of them can be avoided with a little help or guidance.

College is also a destination to which we travel. For most new students, it's like traveling to a foreign land. The same problems that afflict most new travelers in a foreign land can be seen in the experiences of new students on campus. Unfamiliar terrain, foreign culture, and unknown rules and customs can make a new student stand out on a campus like a stereotypical backpack-wearing, camera-holding tourist in a foreign city. Even the most confident educational travelers need a guidebook to help make sense of this new world they are entering.

Unfortunately, most colleges don't have a simple guidebook that explains the real “do's and taboos” of college life. New students are left to fend for themselves as they are immersed in this new world. Sometimes lack of information can get new students into trouble that could have been avoided if they'd had a little help. One saving grace for most new students is their numerous fellow students; they are not alone in their struggles.

The plight of the new student is not hidden from view or unknown; even the words used to describe them illuminate their situation: “freshmen,” “underclassmen.” These anxious new educational travelers are fresh and ripe for picking if someone wants to take advantage of them, just like a traveler in a foreign land. For many of us who have experienced this awkward vulnerability, it is like a rite of passage. We tell ourselves that we went through it ourselves, so it can't be that bad.

A little help and guidance can go a long way to make your transition to this new land a much happier, safer, and more successful journey. Ask for help from some of the “locals,” who always are good guides, and after asking, don't forget to listen. A description of the terrain is much different from the experience of the culture, but seasoned educational travelers have already paved the way.

This book is an attempt to give you some useful suggestions and advice from people just like you who are experiencing college for the wonderful, trying, and transformative part of life that it is. Listen to some of these “travel guides” in the pages that follow, and then map a course for yourself.

Transition

A Senior's Advice

Before I graduated from high school, I had this sudden realization: In a couple of short months, I will be in college! What will it be like? Will I make new friends? Will the classes be too hard? I had a million questions that, it seemed, no one could answer. I had a few friends who were already in college, so I decided to ask for some advice. The best advice came from one of my best friends, who was attending UCI's undergraduate school at the time. He told me not to be afraid or intimidated by anything. He opened my eyes to the fact that each of us was in the same boat, especially as incoming freshmen. It doesn't matter if you were valedictorian or a mediocre student in your high school, when you get to college, you start from square one. Professors don't know whether you were a stellar student in high school or not. Their opinions of you are based entirely on your performance from the first day of class onward.

Also, my friend told me to be aggressive and ask a lot of questions. Sometimes it can be intimidating to raise your hand in a room of 100 students in order to clarify a point. Am I asking a dumb question? Are people going to laugh at me and think I am stupid? No way. He told me that what I had to say was important and that, most likely, the people sitting next to me had the same questions on the tips of their tongues; they were just too scared to ask. I found this to be true as I dove headfirst into my freshman year. It was amazing. I could almost see neighboring students thanking me with their eyes as I asked the professor to reiterate a point. Plus, I built my confidence and my communication skills and ensured that I fully understood the lesson being taught.

Friendships come with time if you embrace them. Chances are, your two best buddies in high school are off to life in the real world or college in another city. For probably the first time in your life, you are removed from your comfort zone and submerged in a world of strangers. This can be scary, but before you make friends with anybody, you need to make friends with yourself. This time of independence encourages a lot of soul searching and testing of your morals. If you were an angel in high school, you can rebel at any moment and explore a whole new world of trouble (or vice versa). Because you're not assigned to a set of required classes, you might find yourself spending a lot of time alone. This alone time may be a first for you, and it can be weird initially. Even if you live on campus with a roommate, you won't have a 24-hour companion. During these times, it is great to look inside yourself and get to know who you are. All kinds of questions come up if you allow yourself to embrace these thoughts. What makes you happy? What do you look for in a friend? What kind of food do you like? What is God? You never stop learning about yourself, but college is a great place to start this healthy habit. Once this exploration had begun, I became much more comfortable with myself; as a result, I became more comfortable around others. It was only natural that I later made some great friendships that have brought me much happiness.

I really feel that my friend's words of advice were what gave me the confidence to begin the journey through college that had intimidated me for so long. Now I am about to graduate, and I find that I have grown in so many ways and made so many new friends. College was a wonderful experience during which I learned a lot about people, the world, and most important, myself.

—Sara Kalawi

The False Image High School Gives you of College

I can honestly say that I must have been blind when I entered college, or at least tremendously naïve. My take on life was that I would graduate from high school, go on to pursue higher education in college for about 4 years, graduate, and then start working and have a family. Let's just say that I was in for a rude awakening. Somewhere in the middle of my freshman year, I was informed that it would be very difficult for me to make a “decent living” (whatever that may be) with only a BA in psychology. My belief was that I would get my BA and begin practicing clinical psychology. Little did I know.

I realize how foolish I was now that I look back on all this, but the truth is that most college students enter college with a completely distorted picture of where their lives are headed. High schools today are more or less prep schools to get you into college, but that's about it. They don't bother teaching students to step back from the high school and college bubbles and look at where they want to be in the end. High schools paint a picture of college as the end of your education, but the truth is that it is only the beginning. It is only after you enter college that you realize you are doing this for you and nobody else (at least, if you're lucky enough).

I believe that this is when you should realize the worth of your education. Everything just begins to make more sense after you enter college: why you were in school to begin with, why you're taking the classes you are taking, and how you see yourself applying your education to your life in the future. I now understand that I will have to go to grad school for about another two to four years after I finish college, but this is not something that I dread. To be honest, I do not feel as though I would be even remotely prepared to go out and practice psychology once I graduate with my BA I actually want to go on and learn as much as I possibly can so that I may one day be the best psychologist that I am capable of being. However, when I compare the way I am thinking now to the way I was thinking 2 years ago when I was a senior in high school, my point of view has made a 180-degree turn. Don't get me wrong, I still want to graduate soon so that I can go on with the rest of my life, but I have now realized that learning psychology is more or less what I will be doing with my life, so there is no need to rush through it. Many students want a college degree more than a college education. I suggest you understand your relationship to your education and what you are doing and don't just do it for the sake of getting the degree and getting out.

So basically, my advice is that you should be open to new things when you enter college. The impression that you get of life when you are in high school is not a very accurate one, so you have to be willing to be open-minded when you enter college.

—Sheyda Bogosyan with John Chuidian

Rejected by a College

One of the hardest reality checks that I have ever had to deal with was receiving a letter of denial from the college that I had dreamed of attending since I was in junior high. Everything that had constituted my reality for such a long period of time had suddenly come crashing down, and I had no clue what to do. For all of my high school life, my hope of getting into that university was what gave me the drive to push harder and take one more AP course, but now it seemed as though all that I had based my motivation upon had been stolen from me. I had reached the end of the rainbow and the pot of gold that I had hoped to find there was missing. The unexpected rejection I faced at the end of my senior year of high school forced me to reevaluate my entire reality: the present, my future, and everything that I had endured in the past.

I had attended private school all my life, and whether we liked it or not, the whole class knew everything about each other because we were a group of about 45 students who had been together for 12 years. We all had expectations for one another, and we more or less knew what we would do with our lives (or at least we thought we did). Even our teachers knew us on a one-to-one basis and had certain expectations for each of us. Basically, if one of us screwed up, there were a lot of people there to let us know, from our parents, to our teachers, to our friends. For this reason, when I got rejected by the school that I was hoping to get into, I felt that everyone was really disappointed in me. This might have been a complete distortion of reality. However, I had put so much emphasis on getting into that school that I had let it define who I was, and once I was rejected, I was afraid that everyone would be disappointed in me. I interpreted people's actions as negatively as possible and felt as though I didn't matter anymore. I was a failure. That one letter of rejection made me reevaluate myself from head to toe. I began to wonder whether I really deserved to go to that school or whether I had what it takes. Maybe I really wasn't good enough for them. Was it that my grades weren't good enough? Or maybe it was my SAT score. But that wouldn't make sense because I had friends from other schools who had lower scores than I but had gotten in.

I knew that I had to pick another school, so I chose the University of California, Irvine and enrolled there in the fall. I was closing one chapter in the book of my life and opening another. All I could hope for was that this new chapter wouldn't be as disappointing as the previous one.

No matter how much I told myself that this was a whole new beginning for me, the rejection I had faced had been embedded in the back of my mind. I felt as though I wasn't good enough and that everyone was much smarter than I. Also, I had lost a great deal of confidence in my writing abilities because I was convinced that my personal statement was the main reason I hadn't gotten into my first choice school. Regardless of all this, I gave my schoolwork my all. I took the hardest classes that I could and was determined to get A's in them, even if it meant that I had to be in my TA's office every other day. I was determined to make the admissions committee that had rejected me kick themselves later on for doing so.

A few quarters passed and I began getting used to UC Irvine. Although I had not really wanted to attend the school, it grew on me. I felt as though I was in a different world when I was there. I was away from home and did not have to explain myself to anyone. This gave me a sense of responsibility that I probably would not have attained had I stayed home and gone to that other school. On the flip side, though, I really missed home. I have always been attached to my family, so moving away was, and still is, a very difficult process for me. But this was positive for me because it kept me motivated to get through school faster so that I could move back home as soon as possible.

I was very focused and knew exactly what I had to do to get where I wanted to be. My bitterness slowly faded, and I realized that I was no longer doing all this to show the other school what a mistake they had made, but I was doing it for me. I had declared a major in psychology and really loved what I was studying. I was at a school where I actually had the opportunity to go and could talk to my professors and get their opinions about certain issues or even have discussions with them. I could actually get the classes that I wanted to take, instead of having to wait until my senior year because there was no room. Even the little things, like being able to find parking in a matter of 15 minutes, made my life a lot easier than that of my friends who were going to the school that I had hoped to get into. I felt as though I had my life under control and I knew what I was doing with it. Because going to school was not as big an ordeal for me as it was for my friends who were in the other school, I even had time to get a job that was directly related to my field and that I loved doing. Everything just seemed to fit together, and I felt as though I was one step ahead of everyone else, even though my original plans had been disrupted. It was a great feeling to know, for the first time in my life, that I was doing all this for myself and not to satisfy everyone else or to meet everyone else's expectations for me.

Although the rejection that I had to face after high school was a very difficult thing for me to deal with, it worked out for the best. I cannot say that I am completely over it and that it doesn't bother me at all. The truth is that I do not think I will ever forget how I felt after receiving that letter and during the months that followed, but the important thing is now I see the big picture. The main solution for me was time. There was nothing anyone could have told me at the time that would have made me feel it wasn't my fault that I didn't get in. I had to prove it to myself.

However, some of the questions that I asked myself made me feel better about all this. Why am I in school? If I'm here because I am truly interested in the field that I'm pursuing, does it matter which school I'm in? I could get the same education in any school as long as I make the effort and I keep in close contact with my professors. Also, will I go to graduate school, and if I do, isn't learning the material my priority? As long as you truly have a passion for what you are doing, you will be the best at it regardless of any obstacles that you may face in life.

You can't let one rejection keep you from being what you want to be. Instead, let it make you a stronger person. Do everything you can to make it work in your favor. Never let anyone or any institution tell y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Detailed Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• Part I Academics and Learning
• Chapter 1 Welcome to College
• Chapter 2 Grades: Can You Perform Without the Pressure?
• Chapter 3 Technology and Learning
• Chapter 4 Everybody Hates to Write
• Part II Navigating the Institution
• Chapter 5 Support your Local Teacher: Or the Care and Feeding of Professors
• Chapter 6 An Academic Question
• Chapter 7 Questions of Academic Integrity
• Chapter 8 Wisdom and Knowledge
• Chapter 9 Pursuing Wisdom in the Academy
• Chapter 10 Adventures in Desocialization
• Chapter 11 Media Me
• Part III Survival Strategies
• Chapter 12 Survival Skills
• Chapter 13 Love
• Chapter 14 Trouble with Parents
• Chapter 15 The Painful Avenues of Upward Mobility
• Chapter 16 Graduation: What They Forgot to Mention
• Chapter 17 The Career: Friend or Foe?
• Chapter 18 Directing Your Own Development
• References
• Index
• About the Authors
• About the Authors: Team Bell