ing the
knowledge in just that form. As soon as the words have left the mouth
of the lecturer they cease to be accessible to you. Such conditions
require a unique mental attitude and unique mental habits. You will be
obliged, in the first place, to maintain sustained attention over long
periods of time. The situation is not like that in reading, in which a
temporary lapse of attention may be remedied by turning back and
rereading. In listening to a lecture, you are obliged to catch the
words "on the fly." Accordingly you must develop new habits of paying
attention. You will also need to develop a new technic for memorizing,
especially for memorizing things heard. As a partial aid in this, and
also for purposes of organizing material received in lectures, you will
need to develop ability to take notes. This is a process with which you
have heretofore had little to do. It is a most important phase of
college life, however, and will repay earnest study.

Another characteristic of college study is the vast amount of reading
required. Instead of using a single text-book for each course, you may
use several. They may cover great historical periods and represent the
ideas of many men. In view of the amount of reading assigned, you will
also be obliged to learn to read faster. No longer will you have time
to dawdle sleepily through the pages of easy texts; you will have to
cover perhaps fifty or a hundred pages of knotty reading every day.
Accordingly you must learn to handle books expeditiously and to
comprehend quickly. In fact, economy must be your watchword throughout.
A German lesson in high school may cover thirty or forty lines a day,
requiring an hour's preparation. A German assignment in college,
however, may cover four or five or a dozen pages, requiring hard work
for two or three hours.

You should be warned also that college demands not only a greater
quantity but also a higher quality of work. When you were a high school
student the world expected only a high school student's accomplishments
of you. Now you are a college student, however, and your intellectual
responsibilities have increased. The world regards you now as a person
of considerable scholastic attainment and expects more of you than
before. In academic terms this means that in order to attain a grade of
95 in college you will have to work much harder than you did for that
grade in high school, for here you have not only more difficult
subject-matter,