The best advice I got in college: A mix of study tips and "you're actually doing alright's"

How to get straight A's, be social, and calm your anxieties about the future.

12 May 2025

A few months ago, I was sitting at a lunch in the BYU MOA cafe with several other math grad students and Dr. Anna Little, a professor at the University of Utah, who was visiting for a forum speech that day. We had been invited to eat lunch with her, on the math department's dollar, to foster connection and provide a networking experience.

It was February of my last semester of my master's degree. If I could sketch out what this time in my life felt like, I would draw myself standing on the shore of a beach, looking out at the huge water. The possibilities ahead of me felt endless in both and exciting and terrifying ways. My future felt open, unscripted, unprescribed, which fostered anxiety in me. Despite having secured a job, I felt like I had no way of confidently describing what the next few years of my life looked like. Up to this point, much of my life had been carefully prescribed. After high school I went to BYU, studied math, stayed for a +1 masters degree program. It all felt fitting; I never once doubted that I was in the right place. Now here I was, faced with an ocean of possibilities, feeling the weight of every decision. A step in any direction felt deterministic for the rest of my life, like getting on a freeway with no exits. Although I knew the opportunities ahead of me were things to be excited about and grateful for, I couldn't help but couple that excitement with fear that I would misstep and set my life on a trajectory not meant for me. This semester was marked by constant praying, meditation, and pondering. Discerning between good and bad is easy; deciding between multiple good options felt impossible.

We spent about an hour telling Dr. Little about our studies, research, and hopes for the future. After, the hosting professor Dr. Kevin Miller asked Dr. Little what advice she would give to us, a group of anxious grads on the cusp of beginning our careers, filled to the brim with worries, hopes, anxieties, and plans. We all listened eagerly. In my memory, I picture us all quieting and leaning forward in our seats, anticipating the advice that would change our lives. I hoped for a cure-all that would bump me onto the right no-exit freeway and disintegrate all my anxieties about the future. I imagined something like "go to all campus networking events" or "find research that interests you". Instead, Dr. Little offered words of confidence. She said something along the lines of:

"You have already set yourselves up for success. Look at all that you have accomplished and where you are now. It would be really hard to mess up your lives right now."

And yes, that was exactly what I needed to hear. It wasn't the cure-all tip I thought it would be, but it calmed my anxieties about the future. It's a sentiment I shared with both the students I TA'ed and my younger sister during a stressful stretch of her junior year. "Look at where you are. Look at all you have done. You are not the type of person who would let yourself fail."

Reflecting upon this experience, I've thought of other pieces of advice I've received during my 5 years of college, and compiled a list of the most impactful. Some are study tips, some are votes of confidence. I've found that the latter is often more important than the former. Still, there are some study tips that I do believe wholly upheld my GPA and minimized my stress levels. The first is a tip from my dad.

1. Treat college like a 9 to 5. Before my freshman year, I was told that college would be much more difficult than high school. High school wasn't easy, but I don't recall spending much time studying except for before AP exam season. My days in high school were rigidly structured, often filled with at least 10 hours of scheduled time. College was not that way. Between lectures, office hours, and meetings, I probably had about 3 hours of scheduled time a day. The rest was to be filled with study and homework. I watched many of my peers going home between lectures and working on their homework at night. Luckily, my dad had sat me down before I moved to Provo and taught me that the key to success in college was to treat it like a day job. Get on campus early, and stay until 5pm, even if you don't have a lot of homework. Stay and get ahead, or review your notes. I did this pretty much every week day of every semester, and as a result, I rarely ever did homework at night or on weekends. It was great because it kept my social calendar wide open, while I stayed on top of—and many times ahead of—my schoolwork. I rarely procrastinated and my stress levels stayed at a minimum. The question is, how does one stay motivated to stay on campus all day? Like anything, it must become a habit. Tell yourself you'll do it for a week. Then keep doing it. If you can convince yourself that it's your job and you have to be on campus all day, it'll be easier to stay motivated. I found it easiest to sign up for classes that had lecture in the morning, so I was forced to get on campus early. Once I was there, it wasn't too hard to stay. This is the single piece of advice I would give to any incoming freshman.
2. It would be hard to mess up your life now. I discussed this in the introduction. The advice/encouragement from Dr. Anna Little, that calmed all my anxieties about the future. Sometimes the advice that will change someone's life isn't anything they need to do differently—it's just recognizing all the things they're already doing right.
3. Schedule your lunch every day. During my first semester of the junior core of the applied math program, our program director Dr. Jarvis sat us down and said, "You guys need to eat, and you need to sleep." I thought that was silly advice, but it proved to be pretty important after a student spent the night in the study lab and showed up to our 9 a.m. lecture the next day in the same clothes as the day before. I began scheduling a lunch break in my day, every day. This actually made me realize how inefficient it was to study through lunch. Packing a lunch and eating it while studying just gave me a distracted 30 minutes. It was much more productive to walk away from my computer, take a break, eat a good meal, and then get back to work. I'm a firm believer that clear, delineated breaks help reinforce focused study. Don't blur the lines. On my lunch breaks, I would often meet up with friends in the Wilkinson Student Center for about an hour to eat together. This also provided a nice social hour in the middle of the day. Because it was on the forefront of our minds, we would often discuss our classes, homework, studying, and exams. It was nice to debrief the structure of our days and hear about each other's classes since most of us were working toward degrees in completely different fields. Sometimes we wouldn't discuss school at all, which provided a nice reprieve for the academic side of my brain and engaged the social part of my brain. Honestly, a scheduled lunch every day only helped my grades and studying. It made the hours after lunch more productive. It taught me that taking a 1-hour break would not make me fail my classes. It helped me make sure not to skip lunches. It fostered friendships.
4. Count how many new people you meet every day. This is advice I gave to my brother before his freshman year. It's something I started doing in my last year of college, and I wish I had done it sooner. I was truly surprised by how many people I was meeting. It was pretty much a new person every day. It made me excited for every day, and excited to socialize. It made me grateful for the social connections I had and helped me appreciate my interactions with new people. It encouraged me to remember names, which I now think is a very important thing to be intentional about.
5. Make this week difficult so next week is easy. There is no study hack (that actually works) that takes out the studying. You're going to have to do it anyway, so just do it now. This was actually advice I gave to my students I TA'ed this semester. It was a couple weeks before an exam, and there was a copious amount of material to be tested on. I told them this: "In a few weeks, you are going to be expected to know all this. If you start studying now, you can just learn without stress. If you wait until the night before you will have to study with the stress." Think of it like a taper before a marathon. The day before an exam should be a light day of study. Make your hardest study day 2 or 3 days before the exam. Make this week difficult so next week is easy.

And that's all, folks! I don't claim to have mastered college, and I definitely don't study as efficiently as some. But these tidbits of advice shaped my academic (and social) experience and guaranteed the success I had. I'll forever be grateful for the teachers, parents, friends, and mentors I've had who instilled confidence in me and invested in my success. I would not be able to write this post without them!