Last wednesday I attended Dr. Schwarz’s talk on his book “How to Succeed in College and Beyond: The Art of Learning.”

I felt like there was a some very good advice, but also some aspects of his talk that I did not agree with. He covered the general topics of the book in chronological order, starting with getting into colleges, and finishing with ‘success’ beyond college.

The advice about getting into college and the freshman year did not really apply to me as a sophomore, but he aknowledged that most of the audience was sophomore or above, and hurried through those sections. One thing he said about freshman year was that the first 6-12 weeks was the “red zone” by which he meant that most bad things happen. Although I found the first 12 weeks at Cornell to be the hardest, I found that most of my freshman year was extremely challenging.

Another thing that he talked about was diversifying the student body of top notch universities. He talked about the some of the challenges that low income students face. I am do not fit the mold of the typical Cornell student, and especially in my first year in engineering, I found it very difficult to keep up with students who had already been exposed to a lot of the coursework. Though this was one of my major struggles in adapting to the Cornell environment, I feel that Dr. Schwarz did not give the issue much attention. He seemed to have focused his advice to appeal to majors in the College of Arts and Sciences where this is not as much of an issue.

Another piece of advice that I think did not translate as well to the engineering curriculum, was to choose courses with great, caring, passionate professors. The engineering curriculum does not offer very much flexibility, so choosing a professor is often not an option. If it was plausible, I could see how that advice would be very useful.

Dr. Schwarz implied that Ivy League institutions such as Cornell often inflate grades. I also have not seen this to be true in the engineering department. Large survey courses in math and science especially tend to have long hard exams, and come out with a bell distribution which is curved usually to a B or B-. I think that this often does not reflect the abilities or the learning of a student very accurately, but not because it is an inflated representation.

Overall I thought the talk was very engaging and that Dr. Schwarz is a very interesting individual and most likely a fantastic professor, but that is advice was not particularly well suited for engineering students.