Positive Attitude is Key to College Success

The future belongs to those who prepare for it today. – Malcolm X

If you are a high school student in your junior or senior year and are seriously considering going to a college or university after graduation, you should start thinking about preparing yourself for the challenges of college life now instead of waiting till your first day on campus as an incoming freshman.

In addition to taking the SAT and a plethora of pre-entrance exams, choosing a major, registering for classes, applying for scholarships or financial aid and improving your study habits, you should also adopt a positive “I-want-to-be-here-and-learn” attitude about going to classes and completing your coursework. 

The expression “A positive attitude determines success in all things” sounds like a cliché or one of those aphorisms that we find in Chinese fortune cookies, but there’s a lot of truth behind it (otherwise it would not be a cliché).

If you don’t believe me, next time you happen to be in one of your high school classes take a long look at the young men and women who share the classroom with you.  Those students who eagerly raise their hand when your teacher asks, say, what was the Missouri Compromise of 1820 all about or to identify all the stages of the water cycle, or the ones who ask well-considered questions about the themes John Steinbeck touches upon in Of Mice and Men, those are the kids who will earn A’s and B’s in class.  The students who sit sullenly at their desks, take notes by rote and don’t participate with any enthusiasm In in-class discussions will be lucky to simply “get  by” with average or below-average grades.  Some, sadly, probably won’t pass the class.

You can probably make a case that some students are more geared for academic success because they’re more intelligent or come from emotionally and financially stable families, but that is basically a cop-out.  When I was in high school I knew quite a few  intelligent kids who came from good homes where both parents worked and provided both emotional and financial security, and yet didn’t do well in classes because they “hated” school.

The basic principle behind  the phrase “A positive attitude determines success” is easy to explain and understand: If you want to be somewhere, to undertake a task or achieve a specific goal, that desire will carry you forward and reap positive results.

A case in point: When I was a freshman majoring in journalism, I signed up for Prof. Peter Townsend’s Basic Reporting class at the beginning of my third semester in college.  It was actually the third day of class – my Pell Grant paperwork took a bit of time to be processed but was approved early enough in the Fall Term for me to add JOU 1100 to my schedule – and at first I felt as though I was an intruder in Prof. Townsend’s fiefdom of future journalists.

As intimidated as I felt at the moment when I handed my “add” card to the professor (who was also the campus’ director of student publications at the time), I wanted to be there.  Not to be too conspicuous or to be noticed right away, but I really had a desire to learn how to be an effective college  level journalism student.

As I sat in Room 3301 on that sunny September morning back in 1985, I surreptitiously took stock of my fellow students, expecting most of them to be as eager as I was to learn the tools of the reporting trade and be staff members of the campus student paper.  After all, I reasoned, most of the kids I’d known in high school who had worked either on the yearbook or newspaper staff had chosen to do so, so I figured the same concept of having a gung-ho,  “we’re here because we want to be here” attitude  applied to the 29 or so students in Prof. Townsend’s 10:00 AM Basic Reporting class.

Looking back on the moment over 20 years later, I suppose that I should have known better, but I was surprised to see that close to half of the students seemed to have a “Do I really have to be here?” attitude that was easy to discern, especially when Prof. Townsend informed us that by being students in this particular course, we were all staff writers for the campus newspaper and thus expected to be assigned stories for publication.

Those of us who had signed up for JOU 1100 because we wanted to be journalists greeted this announcement with quiet but obvious enthusiasm. Becoming reporters and section editors, after all, was our primary goal, so we were eager to face the challenges of finding stories and meeting weekly deadlines.

However, many students who were taking Basic Reporting as a prerequisite to other courses in the mass communications field, especially broadcasting and advertising, weren’t as excited about writing for the school paper. Some of them – who obviously had not read the course description in the college’s class catalog – wore expressions that ranged from mild disinterest to sheer surprise.

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm. – Vince Lombardi

The attitude gap became even more apparent as the term progressed; those of us who considered ourselves journalists-in-training accepted editors’ story assignments quickly, while the non-reporter types had to be constantly coaxed into writing for the paper by reminding them that one third of their final grade would be based on the amount of “copy” they turned in for publication.  Some students in this group did their fair share of assignments and – after a lot of copy editing by either Prof. Townsend or student editors – got bylines in the school paper.

Other students turned in assignments which never saw the light of day or were reassigned to staff writers who earned bylines for them but still passed the course with C’s or low B averages.  A few of that group dropped the course and changed majors altogether because “college journalism’ was nothing like the high school electives they had taken previously and didn’t want to do the extra work which was required from all of us.  By the end of the semester, the handful of us “I want to be here” students either had been promoted to an editorial position that semester or were candidates for future advancement on the newspaper staff for the coming term.

Of course, the notion that positive thinking is the key to success is not unique to academic pursuits.  As Shawn Achor, founder of GoodThinkInc and author of the book The Happiness Advantage, writes:

Most companies and schools follow this formula: if you work harder, you will be more successful, and then you will be happy. This formula is scientifically backward. A decade of research shows that training your brain to be positive at work first actually fuels greater success second. In fact, 75% of our job success is predicted not by intelligence, but by your optimism, social support network and the ability to manage energy and stress in a positive way.

So if you are thinking about pursuing higher education after high school, make sure that you take a positive attitude  to the college or university campus with you,  along with good grades, extracurricular activities and passing SAT scores.

Source: http://goodthinkinc.com/speakers/shawn-achor/

© 2012 Alex Diaz-Granados.  All Rights Reserved