How I Came to Love Watching Movies

When I was a child, I knew only a handful of movies. Cartoons like Studio Ghibli and Disney films. Musicals like The Sound of Music and The King and I. Stuff I caught on TV because my parents were watching it, like Alien and Poltergeist. (Yeah, I know—what was my 5-year-old self thinking? I have a great story about me damn near killing myself while watching a scary movie that involves a donkey, but that's for another time.) Needless to say, my taste in movies as a child was limited and fairly narrow.

5 Tips for New College Students

In the second half of June I got to run some of the New Student Orientations for our department. The students started their day early in the morning, and then in the afternoon they met with faculty members from their major departments (e.g., me) to learn about how to choose classes for their degree, in order to prepare themselves for the registration session later in the day.

Each time a group of students and I met, we talked about points to keep in mind to get oriented to being in college. Unlike Transfer Student Orientations, NSOs include a component for understanding degree requirements, reading the course catalog, completing prerequisites, and wading through semesterly course schedules—things that are easy but that take a bit of getting used to.

There were other points, though, that I wanted incoming students to remember, as they worked their way through their degree programs. Before I forget them (and so that I can file away my papers for NSO), I thought I would log them here.