Everything they tell you about college is a lie.

In high school they tell you work hard, take these hard classes, get good grades and you'll do good in college.

It's all a lie(except for work hard).

Don't listen.

Taking hard classes and spending endless hours doing homework on paper is not going to prepare you for anything, it'll probably just make things seem pointless in college.

Getting good grades in high school also means nothing in college. It's too different to matter.

Trust me.

I did that, I did all of that.

And I was not prepared at all when I got here.

What you really need to do is:

Worry about doing labs.

Worry about writing papers.

Get good study habits.

Get a grueling sense of determination,

and learn how to sacrifice your time for fun so you can focus on your work.

Learn to learn, not just absorb information, dump it on paper, and forget it.

Take it all in. Form your own opinions about it.

It'll be better for you.

And learn how to do online homework.

That is probably the most important thing I can tell you to do.

Learn how to be on the internet without checking Facebook every five minutes.

Colleges like to go paperless as much as possible.

It keeps professors from having to do as much when grading.

Saves a lot of hassel.

If you miss homework online, you're screwed.

If you don't turn in a paper,

you might die inside when you get your grades.

Miss a lab?

Prepare to see your grade drop several percent.

The moral here:

DO get study habits.

DON'T worry too much about your grades.

DO learn to manage your time.

DON'T temporarily absorb information.

DO learn well.

DON'T worry about taking "hard classes."

DO learn to not screw around on the internet.

And I promise you, you'll be much less stressed, and things will be a little bit easier in college.

My rant on technology.

I have long been a fan of Macs.

Not because I know anything about technology,

nor because I want to pretend I do.

All I know is I can use Macintosh products with ease and I don't have to panic and Google how to do things every five minutes.

I am not a fan of Microsoft products however.

If it's Windows, I probably can't use it.
Not that I haven't tried.

Considering the only computers they let you use in grade school up through high school are running Microsoft Windows, you have to try.

And I have failed miserably every time.

Windows is complicated.

And complicated is not good for me.

It's like going through every phonebook in the state of New York to find a number for someone who lives in Yonkers instead of just looking in the one thin little phonebook for Yonkers itself.

Mac's are the little phonebooks.

They are easy to use and easy to understand for those of use who are technologically impaired.

And I am certainly technologically impaired.

If it's not strait up "Oh look, you click this, it does that," I won't be able to figure out how to use it.

I don't even use iMove or Garage Band, but they're simple enough that I figured out most of how to use them.

Macintosh is nice.

I'm not trying to sell you a Mac.

By all means, use whatever computer or software you want.

I just know what I like.

And what I like is easy to use, doesn't break on me, and won't crash every few minutes.

Not that I've personally ever seen a Windows crash.

I have friends whose Windows running computers have crashed, or died and had to be fixed,

and it's just another thing for me to look at, pat my MacBook Pro lovingly about, and tell it what a good little computer it is.

Now, what exactly was the point of this rant?

I had to break down and finally buy Microsoft Office for Mac.

I am a college student and it seems most of my Professors don't understand the concept of saving things as a PDF.

So if I want PowerPoint slides, they opened as a bunch of random letters and symbols.

Word documents? If they were formatted, they weren't when I opened them in Text Edit.

And Excel files? Well those wouldn't even open.

So, it came to be that I just couldn't go without it anymore.

Otherwise, I would've just continued to use Google Docs when I needed to make a slideshow or a table with a graph.

But I had to go spend $78 and some change on a Microsoft product I never wanted.

But I have to say,

I have been very pleased with Word and PowerPoint.

But I have been incredibly frustrated with Excel,

just like my dad always said,

Microsoft will fail you at important times.

All I wanted to do was move a data set to a graph and open the graph as a new sheet.

Excel is meant to do that.

But SIX TIMES IN A ROW I get the lovely error message "Excel has encountered and error and had to close, if you were in the middle of working on something, your work may be lost."

Even when I saved my data before it closed down Excel wiped it out.

I was frustrated and upset with it.

So I restarted my computer, and lo and behold, Excel magically started working.

Blasted Microsoft products.

Not for the technologically impaired.