1. Take early classes – Nothing says recipe for failure like an 8:00AM class in your first semester away from home. People seem to think that they will be able to maintain their high school hours in college without considering that they no longer have anyone to force them to get up aside from themselves. When that alarm clock goes off at 7 or 7:30, you would be amazed at how many times you can hit snooze before it even registers that the time has now passed 8:30 and you should have been in class half an hour ago – by this point you decide it isn’t worth showing up with only 15 minutes left in class so you go back to sleep, wake up five minutes later and rummage through your massive pile of paperwork to see if you had any assignments due or any exams that day. At some point, you will miss one of those exams and it is all downhill from there.2. Have an active and exciting social life with night-owls – My friends and I used to stay out until 4 in the morning every night, head back home for a bit, and then go back out for breakfast at around 6:00AM. Do this and you are guaranteed to have a sleep schedule that is completely compatible with failure. You will either sleep through your classes – all but that 6:00PM lecture, or you will go to class and sleep there – which not only means you miss everything important in class, but also that the professor now hates you for snoring through the class.3. Join a party fraternity or sorority – This is pretty much the same thing as number 2, but now you have to pay for the privilege and you don’t have as much control on when you go out and what days you really party hard on.4. Throw away your syllabi and take bad notes – Your syllabus is one of the most important things you get at the start of the semester, it has all the test dates on it, the attendance policy, and what is to be covered on what day. Lose the syllabus and you are in trouble, lose the syllabus and take bad notes and you are doomed. There is so much going on in college that it is easy to lose track of what needed to be done and when. There is nothing worse than showing up for class and finding out that you needed to bring a blue book to take your exam in, the exam that you forgot to study for because it completely slipped your mind – with 5 classes to keep up with it is a lot harder than you might think to keep track of.5. Plan on cram sessions the night before exams – This is perhaps the one that gets most people, with college being as much fun as it is it can sometimes be difficult to tear yourself away from all the good times and work on what really matters – studying for your exams. There is an entire cottage industry based around helping students stay up all night and try to learn a semesters worth of material in one night. Book stores carry massive quantities of No-Doze, coffee shops work overtime, stores stock up on Red Bull and energy drinks, and all night diners fill up on students working in study groups trying to come to grips with subjects that would have been difficult had they spent the entire semester working on them – cram it into one night and you have a near panic situation. So the next morning, come exam time, you have students who are not prepared at all, students who sleepwalking to class trying to cram caffeine into their system to stay awake for a just a few more hours, and students who overslept and missed the exam entirely. I would just like to point out that I know all of these through personal experience, and I did indeed drop out of college on my first attempt. If you are in the same situation, do not despair, there is a way out of it. Simply take this list and don’t do anything on it anymore and you should be fine. I myself avoided the above scenarios and am now on my way to finishing my Master’s degree, after having spent several years raising my GPA back up to a respectable level. If only someone had given me this list earlier.