Part 0: Before College

First you gotta get in and pick one.

Chapter -1 - High School (or BS) and Entrance Exams

When you are reading this, I hope that most standardized tests will be gone, as most of them are just a way to keep poor and dark people out of college. But, if they are still around, you might as well learn how to study for one without paying thousands of dollars for expensive tutoring.

The first thing to know about standardized tests is that no one does well the first time. Not me, not my friends who went to Yale or Harvard, not those who went to a local community college. The difference between the Yale and the community college grad is that the Yale applicant took it a second time.

The first time you take the standardized test, you are calibrating. You are in a stranger’s room doing strange things. You will look around you, you will look at the test, you will look at the proctor and all these things will make you do worse because they will distract you. You should expect to do poorly as much as a first-time Olympian.

So if you would like to do well on a test, what is needed isn’t intelligence, but discipline.

Step 1

What you need to do is first know where you’d like to go and what the scores they accept.

Step 2

Once you’ve done that, take the test. After you take the test (and bombed it), that’s when you put that score that you researched on a post-it for the school you’d like to attend and paste it on your mirror or somewhere where you will see it every day.

Step 3

Get books from the library on the test. You may need to go to multiple libraries. Try to get the most recent books. At this point, you’ll probably be able to sign up on Princeton Review or GRE or GMAT or MCAT website for the test and they often have at least one practice test. If there are two, take the first one and save the other for right before you take the test again.

Step 4

Study with a schedule. Set a date for when you’d like to take the test, break up the reading of chapters and taking of practice tests, and set the time so you have to do something every day, at least one chapter. Plan on spending 2-4 hours a day. I did general studying during the day and slowly worked through the vocabulary at night. Working with flashcards. Often looking up word use through google helped remember words.

You will finish all problems and books and then start taking tests. Take the test with the essays. Take the test so many times you are tired of it. Register for accounts in the books which will often give more practice tests and take written tests and basically take so many tests where you are tired and bored of tests and then take some more. Take the tests timed and with breaks and no social media or distractions.

If you reach the planned date and you’re not tired of the test, extend the deadline. You want to be so practiced that you can’t stand the test and then take a few more.

Step 5

At this point, you should be hitting a good score all the time. You had gone through all the questions you got wrong and all the tests you could find. It is time to take the test. Make sure you have earplugs. Take with you warm clothes. Grab food and snacks during breaks and hydration. You need to be prepared like a mind olympian.

Now all this will be hard but you can do it. One thing that you will have to do is motivate yourself. What I did is motivate myself with idea that each point on the test could be worth thousands of dollars, major career opportunities, life-changing events. All you have to do is struggle for a couple of months, the reward will be years of better pay and opportunities. Do it!

Follow these steps and I’m sure you’ll do great. Send me a note from Harvard if this helps :).

Chapter 0: Still High School- Picking your ideal college and getting accepted.

In hindsight, I probably should have waited and matured a bit before starting college. My High School, a charter school located in an affluent area of coastal southern California, was more concerned with giving its students ample time and coaching them to pad their college applications than it was about teaching them how to work and study hard, thus I was able to just coast by and never had to actually do much work. As a result, while we all had exemplary applications and our school had high college acceptance rates into very good schools, I came into college completely unprepared for the workload. Frankly, I find it amazing that I even finished college. Even now, I still don’t know how to study efficiently and I’ve never really developed the ability to find my focus. I am not an A-plus student, nor even a B student. I did not have some higher calling to push me onward. I am just a regular guy, too foolish to know when to quit and a bit too ambitious for my own good. But if I had developed the skills to study, focus and find the drive to succeed, college would have been a lot easier. That’s why getting those skills early on will guide you better through college and life more than anything else in this book.

In spite of my shortcomings, through pure force of will and the desire to prove my naysayers wrong, as well as to vindicate those who believed in me, I managed to do what often seemed the impossible and completed my degree. I feel that sometimes, those who accomplish what they set out to do, don’t always start with great confidence; they learn to have self-confidence through a series of ups and downs. A good example is Marilyn Monroe, the shy and awkward stutterer, who re-engineered everything about herself in her quest to become an actress. Or even Abraham Lincoln. He was uneducated, poor, and belligerent, a troubled youth with some serious anger issues. Yet, he took the time to learn law and made himself one of history’s greatest leaders. I learned much from books, from friends, and from my own personal experiences. You will have plenty of experiences of your own to learn from, but by taking a look at my experiences as well, you will at least be one step ahead of me and won’t repeat my mistakes, though you will be making a few of your own mistakes instead!

There is no one right path to college

My parents are immigrants from Ukraine. They understood that I had to do well in school and that I had to go to college in order to have a good life, but they did not know how it should be done. Luckily, I learned from friends and counselors that there are certain requirements that everyone has to complete in order to attend a university: one must take standardized tests, one must do well in the required classes and finally, one must apply with a well-honed application.

Of coruse you also need a portfolio of accomplishments, volunteer work, leadership, etc. The thing that no one tells you is that how well you do in those extracurricular areas is not very important, because every college decides on an individual basis and makes up their mind according to objective and subjective benchmarks. So it is important to know what you want to do with your life, what kind of setting you to thrive in, and to pick a school that fits these goals and preferences. Once you know that, you need to find out what the particular requirements are to get into that school and make sure you have them all completed.

In my case, I knew that I wanted to go to Berkeley. But my PSAT’s (practice SATs) were sub-par and I had a poor start in my first year of High School. However, growing up in San Diego meant that I had been to UCSD on several occasions, not necessarily for academic activities, but at the very least for social ones.

I was there my senior year for a huge rave. The Price Center, the main plaza, was full of kids dressed up in costumes: big fluffy pants, fairy wings, loud banging music, and screaming kids. Nonetheless, my first choice was still Berkeley, for the atmosphere, prestige, and last but not least (and often the biggest reason for most): it was well away from home and gave me some distance from my parents!

To my disappointment, but not such a surprise, I did not get into Berkeley, nor did I get into UCSD. But, I did not give up that easily. I found out that one can appeal the decision. I wrote an appeal and sent it with letters of recommendation from my teachers to Berkeley. I didn’t care about my rejection letter from UCSD but under advice from my mother (listen to your mother), I figured I may as well bring an appeal to UCSD and since it is so close to my house, I came by on admit day and submitted it in person to one of the counselors.

Soon after, I received rejections from both and resigned myself to attending the one college I did get accepted to, UC Santa Barbara. A month later and about a week after sending my first check to UCSB, UCSD sent me a letter of acceptance. My dad was there when I opened it and when I read the decision he picked me up off the ground in a giant hug. I didn’t even know the little man had it in him. I think that was the proudest he had ever been of me, it certainly was the most he ever showed it.

My point here is that you don’t have to be the best, but you do have to persevere; don’t give up, and use every avenue available to you until you absolutely must move on.

Once I was accepted I had a choice between UCSD and UCSB. I made a matrix and for each college I gave ratings and assigned the varying aspects a number 1-5 from most important to least important, weighing the pros and cons of each school and tallying up the points. With the final counts added up, UCSD came out the clear winner.

At one point or another, we all must make a choice, and everyone has their own criteria. I made my choice to go to UCSD for various reasons. It was essentially the best place for me to go, given the choices I had. When parents and high school grads ask me how to choose, I would say that it depends on what’s important to you. I will go further into this topic and detail the criteria I think one should consider when making a choice in a later chapter.