![]() Don’t drink too much and don’t shortchange sleep, as prosaic as that sounds. Regulate time on social media, where discourse can be barbed and peers curate honeyed alter egos that stoke insecurity in those looking at them. Isolation can become its own bad habit, and prying eyes can be the best insurance policy against destructive behavior. He’s well on his way to fluency in Mandarin, which he thinks will give him a definite edge in any future business career.īe careful, especially at the beginning of college, about spending too much time alone. ![]() He’s about to head back to China to teach English for a while. ![]() She gave me her business card and said, ‘Follow up.’ I still have that business card to this day.” He went to see her in her office and kept going to see her in her office, and with the encouragement and help of her and other faculty members, he cobbled together the money to go to an educational conference in Massachusetts, to meet with entrepreneurs in New York City and to spend the summer between his junior and senior years interning for a company in China. I shared my story about how police shootings affected my life, my family. “I didn’t know who she was,” he recalled. Several faculty members were also there, and he approached Judith Cone, the vice chancellor for innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development. He told me that early on he went to an open campus discussion about police violence against minorities. Walker attended U.N.C.-Chapel Hill as a Carolina Covenant scholar, which means that his family was poor enough for him to qualify for full financial aid. And he found them largely by opening up to them. “The most influential thing I did here was find mentors,” he told me. And it’s worth acing, because a professor or administrator who takes a genuine interest in you can be a bridge to other influential people inside and outside the school, to limited-space seminars, to special collaborations, to exclusive summer programs, to competitive internships, to graduate work and more.ĭamian Walker saw that at U.N.C.-Chapel Hill, from which he graduated last spring. Taking that too far, of course, could be repulsively obsequious. (I was on the panel of judges who selected the winners from 2015 through 2017.) I asked them to reflect on college and to rank, in order of importance, such activities and dynamics as coursework, travel abroad, internships, relationships with classmates, involvement in campus groups and reading done apart from any class obligation. They’re not very good at identifying the professors worth knowing - the ones who aren’t such academic rock stars that they’re inaccessible, the ones with a track record of serious mentoring - and then getting to know them well.Īs part of my research, I collected surveys from about 30 recipients of the prestigious Mitchell scholarship, a rough analogue of the Rhodes that sends 12 recent American college graduates every year to universities in Ireland to pursue master’s degrees. You can decide to establish that comfort in college.īut perhaps the most important relationships to invest in are those with members of the school’s faculty. Diversity opens you to an array and wealth of ideas, and being comfortable with it is an asset in just about any workplace or career. But it’s also a wasted opportunity - educationally, morally, strategically. That can indeed provide solace and support. Many students, nervous about a new environment, follow friends from high school or people whose demographic backgrounds match their own into homogeneous cocoons.
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