The Arizona experience offers so many opportunities for you to have the best 4 years of your life. Academically and socially especially socially, University of Arizona stacks up with the rest of the big schools in the country. That being said, maximizing your time in college includes minimizing the drawbacks. The choices you make at the beginning of the semester can inhibit how much fun and success you have later on. Put yourself in the driver’s seat, make the most out of your wildcat years, and avoid these 5 things:
1.) Avoid classes before 10-am.
Especially Fridays. We’ve all been there, it’s the beginning of the semester and this is the semester you’re going to be a morning person. You’re going to wake up early and go to the gym and eat a breakfast just as balanced as the cereal commercials from when we were all 6-year-old. These are great intentions, but you’re really jeopardizing social flexibility and just as importantly; how much time you have to sleep after pulling an all nighter before midterms and papers.
Do yourself a favor and take the same class offered at noon when you can actually have time to wake up and cram or realistically get a shower beforehand.
2.) Avoid driving any more than you need to.
The surrounding ingredients that make up the full Tucson recipe really don’t add up to much when you take the University of Arizona student, out of it there is no freeway going through the city, so literally no matter how far you’re going, you will be hoping for green lights. The population’s average age skews quite high during the school year months because it overlaps with snowbird season, so the drivers out there drive slow and seemingly have nowhere to be.
Lastly, if you’re a passenger and you close your eyes, you will feel like you’re riding on the moon. The roads appear to have never been repaved or smoothed out or anything resembling basic maintenance. Add all of these up and you will be avoiding the road before your third semester for the sake of your sanity.
3.) Avoid selling your textbooks back to the bookstore.
As an undergrad, oftentimes, every dollar is sacred. Everyone knows the most effective way to get students to turn out at a meeting is to dangle a free meal. So, we all understand the importance of getting as much money back from those overpriced textbooks at the end of each semester. The bookstore sets up booths all over campus after finals to give you pennies on the dollar for your textbooks in hopes that you’ll be too lazy to do sell them another way.
Take the time to put them on Craigslist for students taking the same classes next semester and you can sell them cheaper than what they will pay for them, but get 5-times more what the bookstore will give you.
4.) Avoid taking lectures with 300 or more people.
Some people like the larger classes because they can sit on Facebook during the lecture, or they like not having homework on a daily basis, but there are some major pitfalls here. In these huge classes, usually for general education credits your first couple of years, getting a good grade is nothing like it was in high school. In high school, you had participation points, few homework assignments, and quizzes to boost your grade. These grades almost always consist of 3 papers and 3 tests. Mess up on one or two and your grade is shot.
5.) Avoid buying anything in the unions other than a sandwich.
Just because they have pizza rolls at Highland Market doesn’t mean you need to buy pizza rolls at Highland Market. Don’t be the sucker stocking up on Frosted Mini-heats for the dorm at 3 times the cost of getting it at Safeway. The unions are banking on you being too lazy to get to a store and there are much better ways to spend that money.
Honorable mention:Avoid shopping on University. Urban Outfitters might have some good stuff, but you’ll wind up dressing the same as everyone else.
In the end, there are probably several situations to add to this list, and you will learn them as you go. Keep these 5 in mind to shorten the learning curve. Arizona is a great time for everyone if they make it one, but remember these to preserve your grades, wallet, and sanity.
Sean Wendt graduated in 2012 with a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and a minor in Spanish, Sports Management, and an Entrepreneurship certificate. When he isn’t listening to sports talk radio, he’s most likely working on one of his apps or researching startups.