Zen College Life

“Beelitz lecture hall” By Ole Begemann (Some Rights Reserved)

Tips and Tricks

As promised, here is the list of tips, tricks, and college hacks that will help ensure you great success in your college career.  Not all of them will apply to everybody, but there are definitely a few gems here for everyone.  Enjoy!

• Go to all orientations. The fact is, you can never know too much about your school, and any knowledge you do have can only be useful.
• Be friends with your roommate. Being/Having a good roommate is the difference between your apartment/dorm being amazing, or very, very terrible. Read more »

Creating a Successful Environment

Now that we have a vision and a plan to create that vision, it is time to create a successful environment.  This will ensure that you can make the most of your experience and master your academic career.  I won’t get into specifics here, at it will be different for everybody, but rather a general idea of what a successful environment is and isn’t. Read more »

Planning and Organizing

Ok, so you’ve gone through the visualization exercise and you  have a realistic image of what college is going to be like.  You know what your finances will consist of, your academic life, you have chosen the best way to spend your free time.  You have a clear idea of the commitment required for your health and relationships.   You even have an idea of what type of community activities you might like to participate in.  Now it’s time to build that vision into a reality. Read more »

Visualization

The first step to succeeding in anything we do is to have a clear vision of success and a realistic approach of how to achieve it.  Visualization is the approach we will use to create our vision.  Think about visualization like practice before the big game.  If you create a vision of your perfect game, and you play back the vision over and over, by the time game day comes, it will be as though you’ve done it a million times. Read more »

The University of Glasgow

Introduction:

So you’ve gotten into college, and you have a couple weeks till it starts.  You don’t know what to do, and you are probably a little freaked out.  Well not to worry, because here at Zen College Life you’ll find the perfect way to start off your college career right. We’ll start off with the basics and work our way through some of the details.  Buckle up guys, this ride could get bumpy! Read more »

Happy Monday everyone. The weather here in Houston, Texas is supposed to get really nasty tonight, so the school closed and I’m working from home! It’s a lot easier to get distracted here, but I’ll do my best.

This week the focus is going to be on enjoying life. Too often we get caught up in “the rat race,” and we work so hard trying to achieve goals that we never stop to “Smell The Roses.” (excuse the cliche) This obviously isn’t the best way to go about living our lives. Every once in a while it is important that we get out of the library, studyhall, (insert where you study here). It’s a good practice to take inventory of nature, to observe what is around you, to “Smell The Roses.” (I wonder how many times I can say that in this post) Read more »

This presidential election will be my first time to vote.  I’m 23, and while I missed my first chance to vote for my president, I will not do so this election.  I feel very passionately about the issues that affect USA today, and though this isn’t the place for me to tell you who to vote for, I do feel that it is necessary for everyone of age to vote.  Here are the reasons why (and a link to register to vote). Read more »

By Donald Latumahina of LifeOptimizer.org

There are many best-seller books out there. By definition, best-seller books are books which are bought by many, many people. Unfortunately, buying doesn’t mean reading. From those many people who buy a book, only a fraction of them actually read the book. Read more »

This week I have chosen for us to focus on compliments and criticisms.  This is a two fold focus.  We will focus on the importance and significance of giving both compliments and criticisms.

Sometimes we may find ourselves becoming lazy or just not focused on the importance of our words.  This is a terrible place to be in.  If you find that you are not consciously giving compliments each day, and giving real thought to the type and amount of criticisms you give out daily, you could find yourself in a world of trouble.  A lack of compliments can cause those closest to you to feel unimportant or unnoticed, while too much criticism will cause people to feel as though you are attacking them, or are disappointed in them. Read more »

My beautiful fiance, over at The Unassociated Press shared this video, and once I saw it I knew I had to pass it along.  It is truly beautiful, and I can only hope to one day be so blessed as to see, share, and experience the world in this way.

Read more »