Student Success: Afsaneh NahavandiStudent Success: Afsaneh NahavandiThis presentation is about student success – just some basic tips about how to succeed at ASU, and some things that you may know, and some things that might be new for you, and some resources that you can use. My name is Afsaneh Nahavandi. I’m an associate – I’m the associate dean for University College and a professor of management at ASU.There are some basic ones. First thing is to think about what it means for a student to be successful. There are some easy ones – obviously good grades. We all want good grades. Your parents want good grades. Your teachers want good grades. You want good grades. The other element that we often think about as being successful in college is staying on track, staying in college, and graduating on time. For us, we push very hard for – to help you graduate in four years.So those are the basics, but there actually is more. That’s not all there is to being successful in college. We care very much about helping you adjust socially and connect with other people, connect with the university. We care about your physical and psychological wellbeing. Those are part of your success. We care about helping you create a balance in your life, and there are many other elements that might be individual based on what people like and what their goals are. So it’s not just all about getting good grades, it is about having balance, being healthy, doing well, and being well adjusted.Some of this may look old hat to you. Some of it might be new. Some of it you may not realize until you spend some time in college. Some basic differences – obviously you are here because you want to be here. You may be a little bit encouraged by some people, and you have to pay whereas many of you did not have to pay for college or high school unless you went to private school.One of the major differences between high school and college that people expect, but I think it still catches a lot of students by surprise, is that high school is a very structured environment. The times are set. The classes are set. You have a few electives. There is a dress code. There is a rules of conduct. You can’t be in the hallways. You’ve gotta do this. You’ve gotta do that. You come from that environment to ASU and many other institutions, colleges, and universities where there are very few rules. We do have a student of code of conduct, but it’s very general. You can come and go as you please. ASU does not have an attendance policy, although we want you to attend class. You don’t –you dress however you want. You get up whenever you want. It is often very ASU 101: The ASU Experience Arizona State Universitytough to adjust going from that complete structure to no structure at all with very few general rules.You need to learn to manage your time on your own. It’s not structured by others. Very often teachers and parents help you in high school, remind you about deadlines and priorities, and some of you already do that on your own. Butif you didn’t do it on your own, then there’s no one helping you here. Instructors might help you. Professors might remind you of something, but you really are responsible for your own time and scheduling your own time. Typically in high school there is some homework and limited studying, so when you’re done with your homework, you basically are done. Very often in college, we have very little homework specifically, but we have a lot of studying that we require people to do outside of class.In high school many of you didn’t have a full day probably the last year of high school, but typically you spend six hours a day, 30 hours a week in class. Here full time students go anywhere from 12 credits to 15 credits which is 15 hours a week, so you suddenly have a lot more free time. You have half as many hours spent in the classroom. And one of the things that we encourage you to do, we want you to do as adults, as university students, is to make choices about what you do. You schedule what you take, whereas in high school, that choice is very limited.So one of the big differences that sometimes is hard to adjust to, it looks great. Itfeels great at the beginning, but this complete change in how much structure you have is a big difference between what you experienced in high school and what you will be experiencing or are already experiencing in college.So what we really want you to know in terms of trying to help you be successful is you are responsible for your own success. Take charge. Figure out what’s around you. Learn about what’s going on, and we’re going to be focusing a little bit just on basics here. But one of the first things you need to do is to spend some time and review your schedule and see what’s there.One of the keys to success anywhere, but certainly in college, is to plan well. Typically, you’re going to hear this equation a lot, that we expect one hour in the classroom to require you or – that’s what you – we expect you to do – to do two to three hours outside of class. If you are taking a math class and you are a whizat math, it might not take you that long. If you are taking that math class and you’ve always been challenged by math, you might spend a lot more than three hours outside of the classroom. But the two to three hour rule is about what we expect.You also need to think about, although you are here to study and succeed in youracademic area, you need to think about the rest of your life and balance your social life, your family. So in order to be able to do that, time management becomes an essential factor. If you take a look at the stress management ASU 101: The ASU Experience Page 2module for this course, there’s a lot of information about time management and how to do that better. It is an important component of managing stress as well assuccess.This grid is available in the student success module online, and what I would like you to do is to print it out if you haven’t done so already and pause the audio at some point when you’re ready and fill this out. The first line is your regular credit hours. You’ve already filled out your schedule before hand, so you should have that. Then I want you to multiply that by three which gives you your study time. That’s the expected. If you have a job, how many hours a week do you do that? We typically want you to
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