College in the 21st Century

You've got your admission confirmation in hand and you're looking forward to freshman orientation. Let me warn you right now that you're going to get a lot of well-meant but inane advice about college life, and coping with college. The fact is, you're going to college in the 21st century and not the 20th, and a lot has changed. Many of the people offering you well-intentioned advice are not aware of just how much the digital revolution has changed campus life just in the last five years.

You need a computer, preferably a laptop. You need one you can use anytime, and all the time. I've written about that a bit here. Most colleges in North America now offer online classes and require students to use class Web sites. You need something capable of running a modern Web browser, with WiFi and Ethernet support. If you don't have one already that's no more than two years old, get a summer job and start saving. You'll likely be eligible even before classes start for an educational discount on hardware and software; start by checking your college's Web site to find out about buying a computer and software on campus. Chances are that you can get decent hardware prices (or a used computer) off-campus, but it's unlikely that you will be able to beat a campus computer store's software prices. Check the campus Web site to find out if the school has specific hardware and software requirements, and what software the school licenses for you; many schools provide anti-virus software.

You'll likely get an official campus email account ending in .edu, but you'll want a personal email account too—and not one with a name like "partydude" or "cutiepie." Get yourself a free email account at Yahoo or Gmail (Hotmail is blocked by most campus servers) based on your real name. Women want to use a first initial instead of a first name; d.smith@gmail.com is much more gender-neutral than diane.smith, and sometimes it's just safer to have a gender neutral online profile. Look into forwarding all your email to your Gmail account so you only have to check one place. Plus, if you have a Gmail account, you can routinely email yourself copies of your papers as attachments. It's a decent way to back up your files, so you don't lose that paper you spent four hours on, because your T.A. or professor isn't going to be interested in hearing about your tragic loss.

Go ahead and set up a Google calendar account for yourself (you use the same Google log in id for all services); it makes planning your day much easier, and yes, you will want to schedule your time carefully. Google calendar will let you make specific events private or public, allow you to check your calendar on your cell phone (yes, you should have a cell phone; even a prepaid one is usually cheaper than campus phone rates) or from any computer, print out schedules, even share your calendar with friends or import schedule data directly from the campus Web site, once you've registered and enrolled in classes. You might want to check out Google Documents too; it's a great way to collaborate with other students.

Start familiarizing yourself with the campus' Web site. Increasingly, you'll find everything, from forms to schedules to rules, on the Web site. You'll likely find a discussion board there that you'll be able to log onto once the campus sends you log in data. The campus probably has current and back issues of the student paper online; check 'em out. Notice the ads as well as the classifieds and the articles. Use Google Maps and Google Streetview in tandem with your college's official Web site to start getting familiar with what's where on campus and the area around it. Look for places to study when you're sick of being on campus. Where can you shop for the food you can't get at the cafeteria? Where's the cheap but good coffeehouse, the decent pizza, the cheap beer?

You've probably been using MySpace and Facebook for a while. You might also look for FaceBook groups or LiveJournal communities for your school; lurk there for a couple of weeks before you post. Keep in mind that your profs may know and your T.A.'s almost certainly know how to use Facebook and have account of their own; don't post anything on FaceBook, or anywhere else, you don't want to be public. You might think about setting up a private LiveJournal community for your family and you; you can keep it private, but it makes it easy to share photos and news without having to remember to email everyone. Show your parents how to use PayPal; it's a useful way to send emergency cash in, well, an emergency. If they're the sort who use cell phones, consider introducing them to Twitter; you can send public or private messages via cell or the Web; it's a quick, easy way to keep in touch on the fly.

Once you get to campus, remember that you're not the only student an adviser or faculty member or T.A. has. Don't become email pen-pals. Use email to ask specific, clear questions. Don't ask a question before checking to see if it's already been answered on a campus or class Website. An advisor is likely to have at least a couple hundred of students as advisees; at some schools, that could be a thousand. Faculty members in a single semester or quarter will easily have over a thousand students if they teach large lecture classes. If you can just go to office hours and ask a questions, or get help with a paper or homework assignment, do that. Most students in the first two years fail to take advantage of office hours, and it's a shame. Make yourself known.

Over the course of the next four years, you'll notice huge changes in the way your campus uses digital information. Be flexible; be prepared for change, and be prepared to go the old-fashioned analog way and deal with people face-to-face; sometimes it's the best way.