4 Pillars of Academic Success in College

Within each and every one of us is the capacity to succeed, to be great and achieve things beyond our wildest dreams. However, it seems we hinder ourselves with twisted, distorted, limiting mindsets. I say this referring to the belief that external factors play the greatest role in our performance in an educational setting and ultimately in our mission to become knowledgeable. If we as students of the world continue to depend on externalities like money, grades, our parents, friends or depend on those things that come and go with time, we will never reach our full potential. There are 4 pillars to academic success and they cross all subjects. Of course this is my opinion, but a healthy balance of these 4 things is the key to effective learning and education.

1. Personal Confidence/Internal Motivation

I feel this is the most important thing to have. It's the personal motivation to be the best at whatever you do independent of outside factors. It's wanting to do well and be great because you feel you are deserving of nothing less. Doing and performing for reasons like getting into grad school or satisfying your parents aren't reliable, but attaining knowledge because you have developed a love for improving the quality of your own existence is the key to continuity. Secondly, personal confidence goes a long way in maintaining a positive challenging atmosphere. Challenging yourself to do better because you know you are capable of such is the greatest source of improvement, not a bad grade. In short,internal motivation lasts and external motivation doesn't. Know without a shadow of a doubt you can and will learn anything you want to. Whenever you look at a grade and know you could have gotten a better one if you wanted to, but just didn't, that's ignoring your internal motivation. Love to be the best and you'll find yourself performing well across many disciplines.

2. Critical Thinking/Articulation

Exposure to different sets of information encourages students to think and criticize what information is put before them. Critical thinking is what separates memorizing from learning for instance. Critical thinking also encourages articulation of ideas and thoughts that enter our minds thus improving our ability to argue, debate and speak our minds before a group. It promotes tolerance and understanding as well. Critical thinking is half of all the academic challenges you'll face and being able to cultivate such a skill is priceless when you have papers, complex science tests and other abstract assignments involved in applying learned concepts.Learn your voice and speak. This can only be done by opening your mind and eyes to wisdom from all perspectives and taking them as your own.

3.Efficient Learning Style

It's all fine and well to study a lot or to develop an effective learning style, but it's useless if it isn't efficient. We must take the time to improve upon our learning style so that we retain more material in a shorter time. too many people study for hours only to see they only perform at an average to slightly above average level. Every business seeks efficiency to increase productivity, not quantity. It's the old adage of studying smart, not hard. Developing this skill has allowed me to maintain an above average performance level despite slacking in the next department-good study habits.

4.Good Study Habits/Organizational Ability.

Imagine the classmate in elementary school, who always got the "busy work" done. Your teacher says go home and write 30 definitions and you think to yourself "how pointless" and don't do it. However, the classmate, who may not be as smart as you are sits their ass down and writes them, thus getting an A. Or imagine the student who has half the raw talent or ability but works diligently each day and is organized and manages to get decent grades equivalent to your own. These are what you call good students. They sit, listen, attend class every day, study, organize their lives and are prolific doers of what needs to be done. When combined with the other 3 pillars, a good student is unstoppable and makes up the small percentage of folk who maintain 3.8 to 4.0 averages while still running every other organization on campus.

Of course there are other factors you could argue are more important than these 4. But I feel if you have these qualities, you can almost punch your ticket into the upper echelon of academia. It takes a while to get all of them and some are gifted with certain qualities more than others, but we all have the ability to improve them if we really want to. So get on it and get better.