You Can Become a Better Person by Going to College—But It’s Not Automatic

Advice for the College Launch

As a young man approaches his college career, he’s perhaps in the strongest position of his life to ponder and plot the important questions. For in these short years, he is both old enough to think maturely about them and yet young enough to do something dramatic about the answer. As we know, a course charted early can travel much further.

With the close of summer coming into sight and the start of the semester not far off for many students, I want to offer a few ideas for the college launch, hoping that such ideas will help your sons and students formulate an approach and a plan for how they will make the most of the financial and temporal investment that college is.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Different from previous posts, in which I have parents and teachers in mind, I would like to use this article to speak directly to your sons or students. The college launch represents a new stage in a young man’s growth in freedom, a moment when much of the structure that previously shaped his decisions no longer exists in the same manner. So it is fitting that these matters be put more immediately in his hands. Please read it, then share it with your college-bound young men. And I encourage you to find a time to discuss it together.

These remarks are based on the guidance I offer the graduates of The Heights, guidance that I recently put into writing in a letter addressed to them, and which I have adapted for a broader audience here.

There are three sections:

1. Clarifying what success means in the context of college;

2. Developing tools for pursuing success in college;

3. Setting boundaries that promote true freedom.

Clarifying Success

Before you can measure your success, you must first know how success is itself measured. When you reach college graduation, how will you know if you have had a successful college career? What standards will you use four years from now to determine whether you have hit the mark?

Many people in your life, I’m sure, have told you that college will be “the best four years of your life,” meaning the years when your primary goal is having a fun experience. If you approach college according to that trend you are, at best, likely to make college a useless period of your life. And at worst, your college career will be a dilatory time of moral turpitude punctuated by addictions—and a very expensive such time, at that.

So, to counteract that societal trend that treats college students as irresponsible, untrustworthy pleasure seekers, I have a simple piece of advice: have a clear purpose to your college career, and set specific goals in order to attain it.

My suggestion is to think of success as entailing growth in five areas. In four years, how might you answer these questions?

1. Physical growth: Have I become physically stronger and healthier?

2. Intellectual growth: How much have I learned—and retained? (For there is no knowledge without memory.) Beyond knowing more, do I have a greater passion for knowing the truth and the ability to study a subject deeply?

3. Moral growth: Have I become more of the man I am called to be? Do I have a clear idea of who I am called to be? Have I grown in self-mastery? Am I better able to make real friendships? Am I more other-centered with a greater capacity for self-denial?

4. Spiritual growth: Am I closer to Christ upon graduation than I was when I entered college? Do I have a deeper understanding of the truths of Faith? Do I have the theology of theologians and the piety of little children?

5. Professional growth: Flowing from self-knowledge, do I have an idea of how I might serve others professionally? Have I grown in the skills required to pursue such a career? Do I have the necessary prerequisites? Do I have good work habits? Do I understand how professional work fits into the broader arc of my life?

Assuming that your purpose in attending college is to further your education and develop professional skills while growing in your faith and developing your character, here are some practical suggestions for how to pursue successful answers to these questions.

Eight Tools for Success

1. Provide structure to your day.

Very easily can college days become unstructured. To combat the drifter tendency, here are three simple ways you can structure the day:

First, keep a calendar and a schedule for yourself. College students who run into academic problems seldom do so because they have little time for their work, but rather because they have too much time on their hands and end up wasting even the time they don’t have. As a result, you are more likely to do well academically if you stay busy—not hyperactive to the point that you have no time to spend with your friends, or to read and relax, but busy such that your day has a real structure to it. In high school, the 8:00 to 3:00 school day plus extracurricular activities in the afternoon provided you with structure to your day. Now with only about 15 hours of class a week, your school day does not provide you with sufficient structure. Thus you must fill that vacuum and regiment your day yourself. You will have time to get a job, to play sports competitively or for fun, and to participate in a couple of meaningful and rewarding extracurricular activities. In any case, get in the habit of keeping a calendar so that you can schedule your important appointments (class), responsibilities (study), and other commitments (both to God and fellow man).

Second, get up on time to shower and have breakfast before your first class every day. It will prepare you well for the day. Otherwise, you are liable to stumble upon your first period class and be fairly comatose through it—not the best mental state for material retention. Your whole day can be clouded or brightened by that first battle. Win the battle of getting up on time, and you will save yourself having to fight many other battles during the day.

Third, approach your day as a 9:00 to 5:00 job. Take your books with you when you leave your dorm room for your first period class and don’t come back to the room until about 5:00 p.m. when you are finished with your studies and ready to head out to dinner and an evening of relaxation. College students tend to waste the most time when they go back to their rooms in between classes during the day. The music-computer-TV-bed combination is overpowering to all but the strongest-willed among us. You will be amazed how much easier it is to stay on top of your work when you are getting it done on a daily basis. In between classes, make it a habit of going to the library instead of your room. You will also find evenings much more enjoyable since you will likely have finished all your work for the day.

2. Study; don’t cram.

Most students are used to a high school study rhythm that has regular accountability measures: homework daily, quizzes weekly, exams regularly. Time in between assignments is short, so you are forced to study on a regular basis. Frequency of assignments in college is much more sporadic. If you approach college with a high school mentality, it will be easy to think you are doing pretty well—until suddenly you are not. The reason is that for most of the semester you have not gotten any bad grades—often because you are not getting any grades at all. Then, you get slammed; and you wonder what happened?

Here is a system that I propose which, if followed, will help you get a 4.0. It has three parts:

First, within 24 hours of a class, review your notes, organizing them and ensuring that they make sense to you. Note what you need to ask the professor or a classmate for further clarification. This should take only ten minutes per hour of class; it does not need to be long and drawn out.

An optional, though highly recommended, practice is to hand-write class notes. Doing so seems to make the ideas enter the brain better. You may object that typing, because it is faster and allows for more complete notes, may be a better option. The reality is, however, that the slowness of hand-writing notes requires you to synthesize what you are hearing, which means that you are forced to engage with what you are writing. I needn’t mention the distractions that computers in class will provide you too.

Second, once a week, “single-source” your class materials. Most classes have multiple sources of material to know: textbooks, primary sources, slides, class notes, videos, and so on. Single-sourcing means creating one source of material from which you are going to study. I recommend taking your class notes as the starting point. Look at your notes, then hunt the text book for anything that needs to be added. If the textbook addition is too lengthy to add, you can at least put a reference note. Do the same with any primary sources or other material the class is using. This practice will give you the peace of mind of knowing that the one source has all that you need to study. Plus, this gives you another review of your notes and helps you to bring together into an organized system what you need to know. Single-sourcing will probably take you 45 minutes per class per week.

Finally, every three weeks, review all notes from the beginning of the semester. Studying involves both jungle warfare and drone surveillance. In addition to working through the details, you need to also take the drone up and get a broad lay of the land.

If you follow this study plan, you will never cram. You will work with greater serenity and the knowledge you gain will remain in your long term memory, which matters more than that you can merely regurgitate it on a test and offload it soon after. An added benefit will be that you may have some extra time to help your friends study too. As St. Josemaría put it: “When you have finished your work, do your brother’s, helping him, for Christ’s sake, so tactfully and so naturally that no one—not even he—will realize that you are doing more than what in justice you ought” (The Way, 440).

3. Develop life-long skills, no matter your major.

Use college to hone in your writing skills. Nobody will teach you to write after you graduate, and your professional life would suffer from a deficiency in this area. Therefore, use college to write a lot by taking whatever writing courses you can and seeking a professor who may agree to be your writing mentor—college professors are often eager to help and seldom sought after by the students. If you ask, you are likely to receive great help.

Sign up for a public speaking class before you graduate. Again, it is a skill that you will use in just about any profession, and one that will clearly help you to distinguish yourself. Although there are public speaking courses and seminars you can attend once you are out of school, they tend to be extremely expensive and often inconvenient, given your work schedule. There is no doubt that the best time for you to master your speaking skills is while you are still in school.

4. Find the right peer group, while remaining open to friendships with everyone.

By the “right peer group,” I mean people who share the same fundamental beliefs as you and who care about you. You can and should be friends with all sorts of people, regardless of whether they see reality in the same way you do, but it is important to have a core group of friends, a home base, where you can trust that the advice given will align with your values, and where you do not need to feel the pressure of defending your principles all the time.

Invest time and thought into making new, deep, and true friendships. This matters as much as academics and may even be longer lasting. Don’t settle for cheap, easy-to-get, limiting friends. Give your friendship to others, and demand equal generosity from them. This way, you will create your own positive social atmosphere. Among other things, you will help many others to live as true human beings endowed with a rational soul and destined for eternity, rather than as animals. As a result, you will not only meet all kinds of people, but you will also make some very good friends who want to live according to your same values. Some of the ways to facilitate meeting others are participating in clubs, studying in the library, using the athletic centers, joining an intramural team, and attending events in which you may be interested. Keep an eye out for those opportunities.

5. Look for a spiritual life path from the beginning.

Before you move onto campus, have a plan for how you will find ways to grow spiritually. This path, ideally, will include people or a person to whom you will be accountable. If you don’t find this on campus, do not be afraid to reach out to someone from back home with whom you can talk on the phone at regular intervals.

College is likely the first time when you are on your own for an extended period. It is a stage of your life when you can really develop a deep relationship with God. Life is truly beautiful when you have the right perspective. Heaven is reserved for those who know how to be happy here on earth—not just a vague bliss, but real happiness that you find when you are fulfilled as a human being, found when your life is in tune with God’s love.

Those of you who are Catholic, be sure to go to Mass (even during the week), go to confession at least every other week or when events require it, say the rosary regularly, and find some time for your own quiet prayer. Those of you who are not Catholic, besides following the religious practices mandated or recommended by your faiths, be sure to also find some time for your own quiet prayer. Many things will happen to you during freshman year, but you will turn them all into a wonderful adventure if you are a man of prayer.

6. Find a mentor.

Most universities will automatically assign a professor or administrator who is responsible for helping you formulate your class schedule and, maybe, navigate aspects of campus life. But find someone who is open to mentor you in a broader sense, someone who can help you with your academic path, your professional path, and even your personal growth. It may take some time to find the right professor, but they exist if you are looking for them. The best mentors are the professors who wish that the university setting afforded more opportunities for personal interactions with students beyond mandatory classes and office hours. Indeed, the kind of professor that will be a good mentor is a professor who is happily a mentor. If you are unable to find the right professor, again, reach back home.

7. Respect women, and teach others to do the same.

A true man never uses a person as an object. A true man does not use a young woman’s body as an object of lust. As a matter of fact, a true man should not even use an imaginary woman as such an object since imagination has a way of making itself into reality. He would find himself unable to see a young woman as a person if he is used to imagining young women as objects. Chastity strengthens the will and expands the heart. True men with big hearts are chaste. Among the impure you will find the egotistical and small-minded. Think big; be large souled; be other-centered.

8. Treat all university employees with the charity they deserve.

Learn the names of those working in administrative and service departments with whom you come in regular contact. Make sure to greet them cheerfully without fail, thanking them for their work, and when appropriate inquire about their families. May your comportment show them that you respect them and value their work.

Setting Boundaries That Liberate

A final word, which requires some self-knowledge.

Some young men need encouragement to work more; others, to work less. Know yourself and know where you need to intentionally put boundaries. If you tend toward a frenetic-anxiety-driven-work-that-never-ends sort of lifestyle, put boundaries on your academic work. What you need to realize is that success in life is more than success in a given class. Be careful of pyrrhic victories in life; don’t let a victory in a small battle lose you the war. If, on the other hand, you tend toward laziness, you need to put up intentional boundaries around entertainment and rest. Perhaps you need to think about how your rest can itself be a source of growth. Rest is necessary for every person. But rest should make us better men and women, not be a parenthesis in our attempts to live a life of virtue.

You can be a freer man at graduation than you were upon entering college. But this will not happen automatically, as the cultural current flows away from interior freedom. The good news is that as you embark on this stage in life, you are mature enough to formulate a plan and young enough to execute it.

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Opportunities through The Heights Forum:

• Convivium I | November 13-15

• Teaching Boys Workshops | January 7–9, 2026 & May 6–8, 2026

• On-Site Professional Development Workshops at your school

If you are interested in any of these offerings, please contact the Executive Director of the Forum, Nate Gadiano (nate@heightsforum.org).