Adjustment to college work.

Abstract

Your ability to perform efficiently in courses reflects maturity in addition to skills of reading, memorizing, and thinking effectively and creatively. Adjustment to school work is important aside from the value of grades and college efficiency. It involves adjustment to responsibilities and duties-one of the important demands in our culture. If you are mature in this respect, you are capable of taking yourself in hand. You can determine what is required of you in a given course, to reach distinction and to make a contribution. This involves planning your time and energies. As many studies to be presented in this chapter will show, it is a serious error to divorce the attitude and skills which lead to academic success from those which lead to success as an executive. Industrialists who are responsible for production, quality of goods and distribution, and professional men as well, have perforce a wealth of knowledge at hand and are constantly acquiring new facts and thinking in terms of them. Their overall task does not differ too much from your task as a college student.Adjustment to school work, then, is an integral part of adjustment in other areas in the adult vocational world, particularly since learning, thinking, and efficiency, as well as a body of knowledge, are so important to this adjustment. Harold T. graduated fromHigh School where he was in the upper third of his class. He had always received good grades but did not remember studying. His father is a physician and is able to pay all Harold's expenses while he is in college. Harold was a member of fraternity but was not initiated the first semester because of his grades. He wanted to study medicine, but his motivation was not very strong. His father suggested medicine be-21 * This case was contributed by Irma Ross of the Reading Clinic, University of Missouri.