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 »

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 »

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.

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I am a firm believer in the importance of having hobbies.  I diverge myself in so many hobbies that I don’t know what to do with myself.  I build websites (professionally and for fun), blog (also professionally and for fun), ride a motorcycle, play computer games, play guitar, sing, work with electronics, play sports once in a while, and much, much more.  I don’t know what I would do without a good hobby or two.

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No doubt you’ve heard people telling you all of their reasons why you need to learn other languages, whether it be to be able to communicate with different groups of minorities, be more marketable, or any of the other ‘regular’ reasons they use to convince you.  Well I have a different reason.  A crazy reason that will undoubtedly change your life.  Wanna hear more?

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“The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.” - Benjamin Mayes

If I called you and told you to meet me on the west coast, but never gave you any detailed directions could you find me? It’s possible, though I definitely wouldn’t be at the first place you looked.  Achieving success follows a similar pattern.  You could achieve success by mere chance or ‘luck,’ it may fall into your lap, or it may be handed to you.  But these are not chances that most of us are willing to take.  So allow me to give you a kindergarden tip to help you achieve greater success.
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