10 ways to mind yourself in college

Going to college is a bit like travelling to a foreign country. To benefit fully from the experience, you will need a passport and a travel plan, as well as plenty of local knowledge. The good news is that your passport has arrived in the shape of a CAO offer. The bad news is that you must make your own "travel arrangements" in third-level education.

You will now have to accept responsibility for a task for which you have had little or no formal training at school. The task requires you to manage your own learning or to become an active, independent and motivated student.

For example, from your first day in college, you will have to learn to divide your time effectively between different subjects, take useful lecture notes, read for maximum understanding and, above all, ask questions and think critically about the material on your course. You will need these skills because the teaching methods (lectures and tutorials), reading requirements and criteria of evaluation in college are different from those which you experienced at school.

Of course, you could argue that you've heard such advice before. After all, don't your Leaving Cert results show that you're good at studying already? Unfortunately, you're making a big mistake if you think that the learning habits you developed in school will transfer automatically to third level.

For example, can you motivate yourself to study in the absence of small classes, structured lessons or daily inspection of "homework"? How will you know what's important to write down when taking notes from lectures or books? What is the best way to plan and write an essay? And how can you prevent yourself from that common experience of suddenly discovering that you've been reading the same sentence in a book over and over again?

The intellectual challenge and enjoyment of college comes from developing your own answers to these questions. By grasping this challenge, you will learn a skill which will be valuable to you long after you have graduated - the ability to think for yourself.

It's this wonderful ability which separates successful from unsuccessful students. But it requires hard work. As the philosopher, Bertrand Russell, once said: "Many people would sooner die than think - and, in fact, they do!"

Dr Aidan Moran is a senior lecturer in psychology in UCD and director of the college's psychology research laboratory. He is the author of Managing Your Own Learning at University (1997, UCD Press, £5.95) and Learn to Concentrate (1996, Tutorial Services UK, £12, available from leading bookshops).