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Academic Success

Want to improve your grades and increase your academic performance? Setting realistic goals, having good study and time management skills, leaning into your strengths, and utilizing the resources available to you will all help you to be successful in college.

Here you will find great tools and resources for college students.

On This Page:

Time Management & Procrastination

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Managing Test Anxiety

Adjusting to College Life & Homesickness

Sleep Habits

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Well-Being Screening Tools

Use these anxiety screening tools to help determine if you may be experiencing anxiety when test taking or even generalized anxiety. They will help you determine if it may be time to seek professional help.

Additional Self-Help Resources

  • : Expert explanations and flashcards for every subject 

  • by Ken Bain
    Combining academic research on learning and motivation with insights drawn from interviews with people who have won Nobel Prizes, Emmys, fame, or the admiration of people in their field, Ken Bain identifies the key attitudes that distinguished the best college students from their peers. These individuals started out with the belief that intelligence and ability are expandable, not fixed. This led them to make connections across disciplines, to develop a “meta-cognitive” understanding of their own ways of thinking, and to find ways to negotiate ill-structured problems rather than simply looking for right answers. Intrinsically motivated by their own sense of purpose, they were not demoralized by failure nor overly impressed with conventional notions of success. These movers and shakers didn’t achieve success by making success their goal. For them, it was a byproduct of following their intellectual curiosity, solving useful problems, and taking risks in order to learn and grow.

  • by Cal Newport
    How can you graduate with honors, choose exciting activities, build a head-turning resume, gain access to the best post-college opportunities, and still have a life? Based on interviews with star students at universities nationwide, from Harvard to the University of Arizona, How to Win at College presents seventy-five simple rules that will rocket you to the top of your class. 

  • by B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D.
    Meditation offers, in addition to its many other benefits, a method for achieving previously inconceivable levels of concentration. Author B. Alan Wallace has nearly thirty years' practice in attention-enhancing meditation, including a retreat he performed under the guidance of the Dalai Lama. An active participant in the much-publicized dialogues between Buddhists and scientists, Alan is uniquely qualified to speak intelligently to both camps, and The Attention Revolution is the definitive presentation of his knowledge.

  • by John C. Maxwell
    Are some people born to achieve anything they want while others struggle? Call them lucky, blessed, or possessors of the Midas touch. What is the real reason for their success? Is it family background, wealth, greater opportunities, high morals, an easy childhood? New York Times best-selling author John C. Maxwell has the answer: The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure. Most people are never prepared to deal with failure. Maxwell says that if you are like him, coming out of school, you feared it, misunderstood it, and ran away from it. But Maxwell has learned to make failure his friend, and he can teach you to do the same. "I want to help you learn how to confidently look the prospect of failure in the eye and move forward anyway," says Maxwell. "Because in life, the question is not if you will have problems, but how you are going to deal with them. Stop failing backward and start failing forward!"

  • by Helen Sword
    From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed one hundred academics worldwide about their writing background and practices. Relatively few were trained as writers, she found, and yet all have developed strategies to thrive in their publish-or-perish environment. 

Research shows that relaxation and mindfulness exercises can help to improve a person’s mental health, physical health, and overall well-being. Here are some practices that help you regulate negative emotions.

  • : Exercises M1 through M10 are often interconnected. While they can been done separately, it may be beneficial to try various exercises outside of the ones explicitly recommended here:
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