Review: How to Win at College
- Filed under: Book of the Month
- Date: Mar 17,2008
Cal Newport’s How to Win at College is a book that all college students should read. It will give you inspiration, and you will realize that being an excellent college student is not as difficult as many believe it to be.
Is it easy to read?
How to Win at College is very easy to read. It took no more than 2 hours to read. Each chapter is 2 pages on average. Newport even took the time to bold the sentences that were the most important. The book is perfect to sit down and read it during one sitting, but the short chapters make a perfect book to read a chapter a day.
By reading a chapter a day, you can take the valuable advice and attempt to apply it to your own college life.
It’s all Common Sense
When you read How to Win at College you will probably feel that all the advice is just commonsense. Then why aren’t you a top student? Sometimes we believe things to be commonsense, not because it is common, but because after we hear the information we realize that we understood the concept all along, but we never placed it into tangible words that we can use in our lives.
It’s Just the Beginning
How to Win at College is the perfect book in your step to becoming a better student. The advice Newport gives is a starting point. Becoming a better college student is not about getting the right advice, but about discovering yourself. Every student will have different study habits, different ambitions, and different environments. The more self knowledge you obtain the better student you can become.
Cal who? Why should I listen to Cal Newport?
Cal is currently a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is young and he has already published 2 books! Sounds successful to me. If you don’t believe me check out his Bio.
Buy or not to buy?
If you are a student who has lost his way, How to Win at College is an excellent book to get you back on track. If you think you are already an excellent student, you may decide to skip the book and jump on over to Cal Newport’s blog. He continuously adds new ideas to increase productivity, discover ambition, and make the most out of college.
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2 Responses for "Review: How to Win at College"
I didn’t think it was common sense. There are A LOT of things that you can do to “win” at college that is common sense. Cure cancer. Become best friends with a professor with connections. Etc. Etc. I like his book because it gave good ideas that you think “That might actually work/be possible…!” and its a very good starting point.
I agree that it is not common sense, but once you have been doing the things mentioned in the book for over a semester, you will wonder how a student could ever live without.
“I like his book because it gave good ideas that you think ‘That might actually work/be possible…!’”
That was actually was what I was attempting to say. Your words worked better than mine.
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