Putting grades as your utmost priority might mean doing less of some of the things you love. That means watching TV, hanging out with friends, or even cutting back on your sports routine. That doesn’t mean not doing them: it just means doing your homework first. The nerd life doesn’t choose you, you choose the nerd life. I chose that life, and for me, it meant cutting back on some Netflix — OITNB can wait until I’m done with school. But, it also meant building new support systems that I could lean on to get ahead of the curve.
In the first few weeks of college, friendships are made like crazy — freshman are like lost animals, trying to find themselves a new pack. Many will strive to keep their first friendships throughout their entire academic career, but, that just isn’t realistic. You need to make new friends in every class, and let your friend group evolve as you progress through college. Your lifelong friends will probably be the friends you make in your third year, or later — you’ll be a different person when you leave college than when you started, and you need to acknowledge that along the way.
If you are not naturally dorky, you might have to work a little bit harder to surround yourself with the smartest people in school. It is true that you are the average of all of your friends, and when you surround yourself with really smart people, their expectations for academic success start to become your expectations. Don’t underestimate the power of your subconscious: find smart people, and become their friends.
That doesn’t mean copying from your friends homework or borrowing their notes, it means collaborating and learning from them. Having a network of really smart friends gives you someone to text when you don’t know the answer to a specific homework problem. That doesn’t mean your smart friends are going to pop out answers like a pez dispenser: it means smart friends serve as really good tutors for each other, filling in knowledge gaps.
You may be asking where to find these mythical creatures, and I’ll tell you: clubs. Every school has an array of clubs that let the smartest students work outside of their classes under the direction of an academic advisor. When you join academic focussed clubs, you’ll meet a lot of smart people, and you should try to befriend them. Start building your friend network, and get yourself some smart friends.
— Brianne
