Does high school really prepare you for college? No.
Well, not for the most part. The transition from being a high school senior to a college freshman is quite a jump and requires a bit of adjusting. In high school, your academic career is pretty much laid out for you even before you get there. You get a letter in the mail a week or two before the school year begins with your new schedule for the year. You do not get much say in what classes you take besides a couple electives here and there. You are placed in your core classes that you have to have to graduate like English and math, and then move up a level every year.
Then comes college class registration. You ask as many upperclassmen as possible what and whose class to get into and who to avoid, then you go for it. Yes, you have an advisor who can help guide and keep you on track for the classes needed for your major, but you as the student are expected to have it all figured out. The website RateMyProfessors.com will become your best friend, and I would recommend learning how to make an excel sheet to make a sample schedule.
After you have your schedule and your set of classes, you have to buy your textbooks. That’s right, you heard me, buy your textbooks. I can only remember one class in high school where I was required to actually use my textbook. All of the others were taken home and left in my closet until they needed to be returned at the end of the semester. This is nothing like using textbooks in college. There are two extremes on the use of textbooks: the “you don’t need a textbook for this course,” and the dreaded, “you will need the book for this course,” which often means assigned chapters will be given to read, and you will be responsible for learning this material. After figuring out what book you will need for a course, you then must buy it in the school’s bookstore (usually meaning it's way overpriced), or find it on some online website like Amazon. Unfortunately, these textbooks are usually very expensive, some of which tend to be several hundreds of dollars.
Once you acquire your textbooks, you will become very familiar with them because unlike high school where you might crack them open for a couple vocabulary words, you will be reading these like novels. And how do you know what book you need for a class or how much reading you will be assigned for a particular day?
Yes, the syllabus, given out on the first day of class will be your step by step guide to what is happening in that specific class, so keep them handy! High school syllabi were pretty much just a piece of paper that your parents had to sign, but now, it is your every answer.
However, the biggest change from high school to college for myself is the procrastination problem. It gets worse, so try to control it in high school before its too late, literally.
