Freshmen often face difficulties when transitioning from high school to college.
According to Martin Simpson, director of the Reading and Writing Center at UF, the biggest problem is usually procrastination.
It can be an “academic killer,” he said.
The problem stems from the simple fact that college is harder than high school, he said. Students may have been able to get by with procrastinating in high school, so they don’t think they need to fix the problem.
“What used to work doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “Writing the paper the night before it’s due—maybe you got away with that in high school, but not here.”
Students need daily checklists, and they need to stay on top of their homework to be successful, Simpson said.
Part of the problem is the structural difference between high school and college. Most public high schools have students in school for more than six hours every day, amounting to more than 30 hours a week of instruction.
In college, full-time students might have 15 hours of lectures each week for 15 credit hours. They are expected to study 30 hours a week outside class, Simpson said.
Channing Mims, who graduated Aug. 8 with a degree in family, youth and community sciences, said she liked the added freedom that came with coming to college.
In high school, it’s like “having a teacher talk at you,” which is ineffective, she said. “In college, you kind of work at your own pace. You can dabble in a lot of subjects.”
Freshman, first-semester transfers and first-year graduate students make up about 80 percent of the people who use the Reading and Writing Center’s tutoring services, Simpson said.
“In college, you can go all semester long without attending class,” he said. “There isn’t going to be a truancy cop out there.”
Students might not realize they’re in academic trouble until after their first few exams and
it might take getting a “James Bond 007-type GPA” for students to realize they’re in trouble, he said.
“If you have a really lousy first semester, it takes a few semesters to get back to where you want to be,” he said.
Note-taking is also a big challenge for freshmen, he said.
In high school, students can usually get by with weak note-taking skills. But in college, it’s harder to do well without good notes.
The Reading and Writing Center’s website has videos with advice for note-taking, reading speed, memory, time management and test-taking.
Students need to set up external motivations, he said. Sometimes, scheduling weekly meetings to work on study skills can be enough.
The Teaching Center lets students sign up for weekly tutoring sessions that last 50 minutes.
“We can give you external support when you need it,” Simpson said. “Some people can pull it off with internal reinforcement of shame, guilt or wanting that grade.”
The most important thing is that students need to learn from their problems as early as possible, he said.
“It’s one of those old sayings, you only learn through pain. The sooner you deal with the problem, the less serious it’ll be,” he said.
