How to Get the Most Out of College: In a word…mentors!
This (abridged) Oped by New York Times columnist Frank Rick highlights the vital role of professors, mentors and other connections in promoting college success. And, although mentoring relationships are a key factor in the educational attainment and career success of underrepresented college students, such students are less likely to form these vital connections during college. To redress this problem, Sarah Schwartz, Janis Kupersmidt, and collaborators have created, piloted, and evaluated the Connected Scholars program at UMass Boston. Unlike traditional mentoring programs, Connected Scholars trains students to identify and recruit professors, academic staff, employers, and other caring adults who can help advance their academic and career goals.
We have conducted both quantitative and qualitative studies of CS. Relative to a randomly assigned comparison group of UMass Boston students, those students who participated in Connected Scholars reported better relationships with faculty, reduced avoidance of help-seeking, and, according to their academic records, a higher GPA one year later (Schwartz et al., American Journal of Community Psychology). Variations of this model have been rigorously evaluated and shown to lead to improvements in academic and career outcomes, including reduced attrition (Millenky, Schwartz, & Rhodes, 2013; Schwartz, et al., 2013; Spencer, Tugenberg, Ocean, Schwartz, & Rhodes 2014). Importantly, mentoring relationships are more enduring when students play a greater role in selecting their own mentors
With funding from the W.T. Grant Foundation, Sarah and our team are conducting a rigorous evaluation of Connected Scholars this fall with UMass Boston freshmen and entering transfer students as a one-credit course. This will enable a strong research design and greater access to all students.
How to get the most out of college By Frank Bruni
They’re privileged, pivotal years. Navigate them with as much care as you did the path that got you there.
Illustrations by Ben Wiseman
We inundate them with tips for getting in. Spend summers this way. Write essays that way. Play a niche sport. Play an obscure instrument.
And then? We go mum, mustering less urgency and fewer words for the subject of actually navigating the crucial college years to best effect. It’s strange. And it’s stupid, because how a student goes to school matters much, much more than where.
So for several years — during visits to campuses, interviews with experts on higher education and interactions with recent graduates — I’ve been gathering wisdom along those lines.
My interest isn’t which types of programs at which kinds of institutions yield the surest employment and highest salaries. That information is already out there and always changing. I also worry that it casts college as purely vocational and plants the false notion that, at the age of 18, you know yourself well enough to plot out the entirety of your professional life.
My focus is on optimal ways to socialize, to prioritize, to pick up skills integral to any career and to open up exciting opportunities both en route to a degree and after you’ve acquired it. Not nearly enough of the roughly 20 million Americans who are beginning or resuming college over the coming weeks pause, in their trepidation and exhilaration, to think about that.
Many don’t have the luxury: College for them is a slapdash scramble to grab credits as they can while working a demanding job, caring for family members or both. More than a third of the students enrolled in higher education in this country attend two-year institutions. Those at four-year institutions often don’t participate in the romantic ideal of nurturing dormitories and verdant quadrangles. They live with parents. They pray for parking.
But others do have the freedom to tailor their time. They just neglect to take advantage of it. My friend Eric Johnson, who provides guidance to underprivileged students at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, put it to me this way: “The more you regard college as a credentialing exercise, the less likely you are to get the benefits.”
And they build social capital, realizing that above all else, they’re in college “to widen the circle of human beings who know you and care about you,” he said. That’s perfectly put.
Many students, nervous about a new environment, follow friends from high school or people whose demographic backgrounds match their own into homogeneous cocoons. That can indeed provide solace and support. But it’s also a wasted opportunity — educationally, morally, strategically. 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. You can decide to establish that comfort in college.
But perhaps the most important relationships to invest in are those with members of the school’s faculty. Most students don’t fully get that. 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.
As 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. (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.
Relationships with faculty members was also an option, and it was the clear winner, placed near the top by almost all of the scholars and at the top by many, including Azza Cohen, a documentary filmmaker who graduated from Princeton in 2016. To explain that ranking, she directed me to a 2014 essay of hers for The Daily Princetonian that was titled “Empty Chairs.” It charted her realization and regret that she and so many classmates skipped professors’ office hours and didn’t avail themselves of invaluable conversations and counsel. “In the routine rush to finish our assignments, sometimes the breadth of the surrounding intellectual force field slips our minds,” she wrote. She was then a sophomore, and she mended her ways.
Reading her essay, I was reminded of an interview I did several years ago with Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, about her days at the University of Denver. She said she liked to sign up for the front end of office hours, because she wanted to catch professors when they weren’t feeling depleted and watching the clock. She read up on professors beforehand and, if their written work was accessible, familiarized herself with it, so she could make mention of it. That flattered them and pegged her as a serious, considerate person.
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Taking that too far, of course, could be repulsively obsequious. The correct calibration is everything. 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.
Damian Walker saw that at U.N.C.-Chapel Hill, from which he graduated last spring. “The most influential thing I did here was find mentors,” he told me. And he found them largely by opening up to them.
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. He told me that early on he went to an open campus discussion about police violence against minorities. Several faculty members were also there, and he approached Judith Cone, the vice chancellor for innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development.
“I didn’t know who she was,” he recalled. “Short lady. I shared my story about how police shootings affected my life, my family. 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. He’s about to head back to China to teach English for a while. He’s well on his way to fluency in Mandarin, which he thinks will give him a definite edge in any future business career.
Walker is an example of what a mammoth study by Gallup, Purdue University and the Strada Education Network has found. Previously known as the Gallup-Purdue Index and now called the Strada-Gallup Alumni Survey, it has questioned about 100,000 American college graduates of all ages about their college experiences, looking for connections between how they spent their time in college and how fulfilled they say they are now.
The study has not found that attending a private college or a highly selective one foretells greater satisfaction. Instead, the game changers include establishing a deep connection with a mentor, taking on a sustained academic project and playing a significant part in a campus organization. What all of these reflect are engagement and commitment, which I’ve come to think of as overlapping muscles that college can and must be used to build. They’re part of an assertive rather than a passive disposition, and they’re key to professional success.
I’m not saying that this is a cinch, nor am I ignoring the demons in the way. Anxiety and depression are legion on campuses today, holes that too many students fall into and never crawl out of. More than ever, students should be on the lookout for them and take the necessary steps to mitigate them.
