Plans Before College

I start college in little under a month so I thought it’d be a good idea to go over what I’m doing to ease myself back into education.

The tricky part about learning is that you never really stop, so this makes it tricky when trying to deliberately learn new things. Sure, with enough time anyone can learn anything, but if you misjudge the amount of precursoury knowledge required then you’re gonna be in for a rough time straight out the gate. That’s why I’m developing this post to remind myself what steps I can take and what I should do before I start my course in Septemeber.

First (and Final) step: Read!
That’s literally it. I’ll go into more detail later on but if you want the long and short of it, there you go. Reading now is so important because when I’m in college I’ll have to be doing it as much as possible, even if it’s just to bump up my personal statement. There’s always something new to read that’ll expand what I already knew.

OK, so what to read?
I’m gonna be real with you, my attention span is not great. This can be pretty frustrating if I’m trying to read. So if I want to read I’m going to have to be smart about it. This means getting the best info to word count ratio as possible.
But what book could possibly give me that? Enter: Literary Theory: an anthology. A book with a stellar cover but its image is weakened by its academic title. The second edition goes for pretty cheap online so it’s well worth picking up a copy just to sit on your shelf and show everyone how smart you are. Beside the title, it has some great stuff inside. Take the fact that it has great historic works (Delueuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Hegel’s The Science of Logic, Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology) all shortened down to the parts that matter. The book explains Marx’s theory of capital, Hegel’s dialectics, Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis and more in its one thousand page count. And, because it explains so much, the articles/ exerpts are relitively small, allowing for a few to be read in a day - without making your head spin thanks to its useful grouping of subjects so everything you’ve learned so far feeds into each other.

This book enables the first step of my plan: read one article a day before college, while trying to upload blog posts about what I read. This means that I’ll get used to this style of academic writing well before the course starts and I’ll have some clever ideas to bring up in essays. But this book alone isn’t going to help me ace any modern lit exams.