Читать книгу Maximize Your College Experience : Get the Most Out of Your College Experience for Success Now and In the Future - Timothy Skjellerup - Страница 3

Hi, my name is Tim Skjellerup, and my goal is to help you get the most from your college experience. I’m not just talking about good grades, although that’s one aspect I will help you with. I’m talking about the whole show. Grades, social life, relationships, networking, and the like. You need to read this book from cover to cover because of one word. It’s “experience.” You should read this book because of the experience that I have to offer you. It’s been said that “experience is the best teacher”; I think that’s nonsense. I agree with James Malinchak when he says that it’s other people’s experience that we can learn the most from. And lucky for you, I have had plenty of experience as a student. I have had five different majors and have attended two different community colleges, a state school and a private Ivy League school. I have been a full-time student, part-time student, and an online student. I have lived on campus and off campus. I have dropped out, almost failed out, been on the president’s list, and graduated with honors.

I first attended college right out of high school and then returned as a “nontraditional” student with a family after serving in the active-duty United States Marine Corps. I completed my last two years of college as a “nontraditional” single parent while training for an Ironman triathlon, wondering how it would all come together.

I don’t know where you are in your academic pursuits. Maybe you’re a brand new college student right out of high school and you’re not quite sure what to expect. Perhaps you’re a returning veteran after serving on active duty or reserves. You could be going part time while working full time with a family at home. You could be a single parent struggling to keep it all together, or an athlete trying to find a balance between achieving excellence in your sport and winning academically. You may be struggling with a learning disability or substance abuse and on the verge of dropping or failing out. Or you may be viciously fighting for the top 5 percent spot in your graduating class. It is possible that you are just bouncing back from a horrible life tragedy or you’re trying to reinvent yourself.

Friends, I’m here to tell you that if you’re in any of these situations, I know how you feel; I’ve been there, seriously. And wherever you are, my goal is for you to finish this book empowered with the tools and techniques necessary to identify, envision, and achieve whatever it is that you put your mind to, regardless of your past academic performance or your current life circumstances.

It doesn’t matter what your past looks like or where you came from. It only matters where you are going and what the vision that you hold for the future looks like.

I realize, and I hope you realize, how precious your time is. Because of that I’m not going to waste any of either of our times filling this book with a bunch of fluff or theoretical bull crap. You are going to get real life examples of applicable techniques and action steps that you can implement into your life right now that will help you become the best that you can be in all aspects of your life.

So, long story short, you need to read this book because I have made a tremendous number of mistakes and I have learned from them. I have done it the wrong way and come back and done it the right way. I have spoken with and interviewed some of the most successful students and most brilliant professors and advisers in the country, and their input is included in these pages. I have made really bad decisions and done things that have royally screwed up my life in and out of college. And I have brought it all back together in order to achieve my goals and attain a level of success that I could only dream of. For over a decade I have been studying the habits of some of the most successful people in the world, applying those principles to my life, and receiving extraordinary results because of it. I want to share what I have learned with you now so that you can experience the feeling of setting and achieving big, audacious, awesome goals. My hope is that you can avoid some of the pitfalls and mistakes that I have made in my life and apply the principles of success that I have applied in my own life to your situation.