Choosing to Make the Most of College
College for Christians - Introducing Part Four
Not all colleges and universities in the United States actually require applicants to put down their college deposit by the same deadline, but May 1st has become the traditional date when American high school students make their college choice.
National College Decision — or Signing — Day is hard to miss. Just search the #decisionday hashtag on Instagram, and you’ll find students, high schools, and colleges marking the moment. Some even organize “signing parties” for the first day in May. For example, Michelle Obama launched her Reach Higher initiative on a Signing Day event in 2014; aimed at helping more first-generation and low-income students continue their education, Reach Higher was celebrating 3,000 such May 1st parties by 2019.
The COVID-19 lockdown put a damper on such celebrations, yet deciding where to go remains an undoubtedly huge college decision — the subject of the second part of this book.
But now that you’ve made your choice, you’ll start to realize that the May 1st of your senior year in high school is just the first of many college decision days. As I wrote back in the introduction, “the choices you make in college are at least as important as your choice of college.”
In that sense, “college decision day” is also the day you register for classes and the day you choose a major… the day you decide whether to live on campus or commute… the day you pledge a frat or join a club… the day you decide whether or not to let ChatGPT write a paper for you instead of doing your own thinking and writing… the day you decide to make your faith your own. College decision day is every day you spend in college, as you face choice after choice: how to spend your time, where to devote your attention, with whom to form your relationships, which ideas to believe and which goals to pursue.
So as we near the end of College for Christians, we’ll ask a different set of questions, aimed to help you make the most of your time in whatever college you’ve decided to attend. Whether you’re getting started at the two-year school less than a mile from your house or you’re crossing the country to attend a large research university or a small Christian college, Part Four will raise some practical questions to go with the more philosophical ones posed in Part Three. They’re questions you’ll keep asking until graduation, but I particularly want to help you transition into your first year of higher education, when you’ll have abundant freedom to choose from endless opportunities… but you’ll also start to determine the kind of student you’ll be for the years to follow.
In this section:
Ch. 16 - “How Is College Different from High School?”
Ch. 17 - “What Will I Study at College?”
Ch. 18 - “What Do Professors Mean When They Say…?”
Ch. 19 - “Should I Live on Campus?”
Ch. 20 - “Should I Use AI in College?”