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Photo Credit: www.uvi.edu
Welcome to the University of the Virgin Islands!
Whether this is your first time in college, or whether you are returning to studies, you are about to embark on a new journey toward success. This course is intended to increase the likelihood that you will achieve academic and personal success and complete your degree programs. Here you will:
- Develop greater self-awareness
- Become acclimated to University life
- Achieve a connection to and involvement with the University community
- Gain an understanding of how to effectively manage your academic experience
- Become familiar with approaches to completing assignments and research that reflect college-level readiness
- Identify and utilize UVI academic and student support resources
Perhaps you are taking a focused program to lead you into your desired career. Perhaps you are exploring courses in different areas, providing a foundation for future specialization. Wherever you are in your journey, you find yourself in a learning environment that is different from one you have experienced before.
Photo Credit: www.uvi.edu
What Does Success in College Mean To You?
This book focuses on the behaviors that garner success. Perhaps a good place to begin is in understanding what is meant by success. When asked the above question, typical responses from students currently enrolled in college are:
- Getting all A’s and B’s in my classes
- Scoring the game winning point at the final seconds
- Having an incredible social life
- Being the first person in my family to graduate college
- Making the Dean’s list every semester and graduating with honors.
Notice that these responses tend to focus on outer signs of success, high grades and popularity. They are public, visible achievements that allow us to demonstrate our worthiness.
When the same question is asked of people 10 years after they leave college, the typical responses are:
- Focus on learning instead of just getting good grades
- Major in a field that really excited me
- Constantly ask myself how what I was learning could be used to make a difference in the world
- Discover my personal values and find ways to get personal satisfaction from my work
- Learn more about the rest of the world and learn a lot more about who I really am as a person.
These responses tend to focus more on inner success, enjoying learning and personal fulfillment. These successes are private, invisible victories that can offer a profound sense of inner happiness.
Both outer and inner success are important for us to strive to achieve. Therefore a good definition of success for us to consider is: Success is staying on course to your desired outcomes and experiences. In other words, you experience success whenever you make progress toward getting the things you want for yourself. [1]
There are different ways to understand how success can be achieved. It is probably most helpful to visualize success from a personal perspective to make it more meaningful to yo