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Some advice for UMass (and other) students

by Brian W. Ogilvie


UMass is a great place to get an education - if you know what you're doing. If you don't it can be frustrating and alienating. The best thing to do is get advice from people you trust. If you want advice from me, I'm happy to give it.

Your curriculum

Getting a degree from UMass can seem like a four-year-long shopping trip: you have a list of things to get (your gen ed and major requirements) and you check off each item as you add it to your cart. But when you're done shopping, will you be able to make a decent meal out of what you bought? Will your courses add up to a coherent program of study?

It's neither possible nor desirable to make all your courses fit together, but you can cluster them around significant themes, creating local centers of coherence in your curriculum. For instance, if you are interested in American history and cultural history, you might take two or three different American history courses in the same semester, to compare different periods or themes, or you might take a course in American cultural history, a course in European cultural history, and a course in cultural anthropology as an elective. You can also plan ahead--to some degree at least--so that the courses you take later in your career will deepen your knowledge of subjects you have already studied.

Keep a journal of reflections on your courses, and make a point of thinking about how the topics, themes, and approaches in your different courses are related. You'll find both striking similarities and intellectually productive dissonances. (See Howard Gardner's book The Disciplined Mind for some good advice on a curriculum--going far beyond the major. Though Gardner's main concern is precollegiate education, his approach is also useful for thinking about college.)

Writing

The single best thing you can do in college is learning to write well.

How do you learn to write well? You can take courses. You have to take the first-year writing course and the junior-year writing course. If you want, you can take experimental courses in writing. You can take one or more courses in Technical Writing. You can become an English major, though that by itself is no guarantee you will learn to write well.

But you can learn to write well without taking courses. Good writing rests on simple principles, which are set out in a gem of a book by Joseph M. Williams, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. Get it and read it. Then start practicing. And start reading: it's a rare writer who can write well without reading a lot of good writing. The principles of style are simple, like the principles of running, but if you try to apply them consciously, all the time, you will stumble or fall. You need to read good writers, writers who have mastered the principles and apply them unconsciously, if you want to stay on your feet.

To write, of course, you need something to write about and someone to write for. Write for yourself--keep a journal. Write for your friends--everyone appreciates a good letter, an e-mail that is written with deliberation. Write for your classes, even if you don't have to--you'll learn more if you take half an hour every week to write about the most important thing you learned than if you spend three hours cramming the textbook. But never, under any circumstances, write for your professor. Oh, you'll have to write papers for class, but you should always imagine your professor as only one part of a larger audience. Professors hate reading papers that are written just for them. Those papers are boring. I know, I'm a professor. (For more tips on who to write for, and how to write to them, look at a great book by Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams, The Craft of Research, which has a much broader scope than its title might imply on first glance.)

The History Department has more writing resources on its writing page.

More advice

UMass has a site called YouMass, which is a guide to the university for students.


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This page last modified: 05-Sep-2010 6:31 PM