Graduating high school to land us in college doesn’t mean that all our teachers now will treat us like adults who know better in life. College is only an extension of high school in which students continue to decipher and read in between the lines of what their college professors are saying. Be alert, don’t take their every word too seriously. Some statements we hear semester after semester, class after class.

1. “You can’t study for the test the night before.” To be honest, the greatest lesson we practice ’til perfect at college is how to cram an entire half semester or semester’s worth of material into 24 hours of straight studying. After all, isn’t that the purpose of Main Stacks and the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union? Trust us, professors, our young brains are able to pick up information and store it for a couple hours before it needs to be regurgitated out onto our Scantrons and green and blue books. After that, it’s a whole other story.
2. “You need to buy the newest edition of the readers, plus the study notes that I’ve put into a notebook, plus these PDF files with all the extra notes that we might go over in class.” Let’s be honest, they just want us to buy the books they’ve written and get more money for their department. There’s literally no difference between the newest edition and the one that’s a couple years older. The rest of these notes we can take by ourselves, thank you very much.
3. “Don’t use your phones in class. I can see them all and will confiscate them.” Please, we aren’t in high school anymore. We’ve mastered that skill back in eighth grade. We could probably text on our iPads in class and you wouldn’t notice. This, of course, is especially meant for those minuscule classes where you probably could recognize each face on the street if you tried.
4. “You need to attend every lecture or you won’t do well in the class.” Maybe the professors are feeling lonely and want your company, but skipping a couple lectures is definitely not going to tank your GPA. In fact, isn’t that what the mandatory attended discussions are meant for, to catch up on missed work and get clued in for the tests?
5. “This is going to help you in the real world.” Lies. Hearing this statement for all four years of high school, we’ve finally concluded that derivatives and the timeline of the presidents are definitely not going to help us in the future.

Don’t fall for these ridiculous lies, Bears, just follow your heart and you will succeed.