Ten on Tuesday

In typical fashion, I'm getting this in just under the wire...

Ten Things I'd Tell a College Freshman

1. As the poet said, make much of time. You don't have as much of it as you think.
   
2. Get your priorities straight, aka applying the 80/20 rule: for any task, 80 percent of the work will take you 20 percent of the time and effort. If you don't have time to do it all, do as much as you need to as well as you can. This is probably the most important thing I learned in college. There's a reason they give you more work than you can comfortably do.
   
3. Study, study, study. I wish I'd studied more; it would have saved me time in the end.
   
4. Play to your strength, but also...
   
5. Go outside your comfort zone. If you're a math geek, take an English class; if you're an English major, take math (logic and statistics, both endlessly useful, count as math).
   
6. Don't spend all your time studying: do something extracurricular with people you like. In fact, do a bunch of things, and as time goes on pick a couple to concentrate on. (I really wish I'd stuck with the college paper. I'd have learned a lot and it would have been better written.)
   
7. Learn how to learn. When starting any new endeavor you'll never know even half of what you need to know, so get in practice.
   
8. You will bump into professors who are egomaniacs, jerks, sexist pigs, who haven't had a new thought in 40 years. Pay attention to them: they can teach you something, if it's only how the world looked 20 years before you were born. Knowing a little about coping with an egomaniac sexist jerk may also come in handy.
   
9. Look for people who are different from you. (They won't be hard to find, even if everyone is studying the same thing and comes from the same part of the country.) Once you've found them...
   
10. Listen.