CASS COLEMAN Contributing Writer

The Learning Center at Piedmont College is a great place to come if you want a quiet space to do homework and study. It is also where you will find some useful classmates who work as tutors. I am one of these people and I currently work with students in the health and exercise science department.

This is a fun, but challenging major, that requires a considerable amount of time and effort. However, this effort is necessary to succeed, not only in your undergraduate studies, but also in any future graduate program and ultimately in your future careers in the various health science fields. As a freshman, there are three basic things that you can do to be successful in your chosen undergraduate major.

The first and most important thing you can do is choose a major that you are interested in and will enjoy. This may seem obvious, and probably is obvious, but it will be very important over the next four years. If you enjoy what you are learning about and the interest level is high, then your willingness to want to learn and study will increase and the knowledge will come much easier.

The second thing is another obvious idea that a lot of people struggle with. Go to class. This isn’t a hard thing to do, and yet many students struggle to make it to every class. Now, just showing up for class is a start, but paying attention and taking good notes in class will carry you a long way as you will not have to teach yourself the material when you begin studying for an exam.

The third tip is to study as you go rather than trying to cram for every test. This strategy may be a little bit more difficult to force yourself to do. Study when you don’t have to? “No thanks” is what most students will say to that. However, this strategy will save you a lot of time when it is actually time to study for the test because you will already be much more familiar with the material than most. This will also help if you decide to come to the Learning Center to be tutored. After all, it is very hard for a tutor to teach an entire exam’s worth of material in one session.

If you follow these three basic tips and put in effort along the way, then your undergrad days will not be as bad as people make them out to be.