Asklemmy

Do the reading, homework, and assignments as soon as you can, and sleep well.

Buy a vehicle that looks like the campus maintenance vehicles and get easy parking around campus.

Go to office hours and ask thoughtful questions, you can network with both students, staff, instructors, and TAs, everyone is your network.

In some universities its cheaper to not buy a parking pass, and just pay the tickets (assuming its infrequent enough).

Having at least a few hours of sleep between all that shit you studied and your test will get better results than pulling an all nighter to study like 4 more hours. First of all, your brain sucks balls at information storage and retrieval when you're exhausted. And second of all, sleep is when your brain organizes all the new info you picked up, so you will actually remember more of what you studied after you've slept.

Do what it takes to pass your classes in university, but prioritize finding an internship or entry level job for your career. No one cares about your GPA, but all entry level jobs want experience.

To avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of graduating and never getting a job because they want experience, and you can't get the experience unless they give you a job, get an entry level job in college and try to get extra responsibilities in that job for your resume.

Don't buy the textbooks. You probably don't need them. If you do, buy a used one from another student for 1/100th of the price or get an online copy.

In every class, try to score as high as possible on the first assignment/exam. Since less material is covered at that point, less effort is required per unit of results.

Then later in the semester, you're free to put your effort where it's most needed, instead of needing to scramble across all your classes because you need good results on the final assignments just to pass.

Also, in subjects with group work, it lets you survive a bad group, rather than failing your course because you get stuck with some maladjusted dingus. Moreover, you can use your high grades on the first assignment to leverage your way into a good group. This kind of group-work metagaming is especially important in engineering subjects, and doubly so again if the course is bell-curved.

Finally, try to do one creative thing per year and put it in a public forum, especially on a platform you control (e.g. a blog). Even small things are OK. Literally having any body of work outside of class assignments will let you crush 90% of your peers when applying to grad school, a job, a scholarship, or really just about anything with a halfway sane selection process. It's also fun (doing creative things, not crushing your peers).

Create a schedule and adhere to it.

Make friends, join clubs, and have fun.

Attend your lectures. I found that even if I was doing work for another class or playing on my iPad, I still gained something from attending lectures.

Go to office hours and build a relationship with your professors.

Create a four year plan of all of your classes. Your advisor may not be a good one and can fuck you over.

Take some summer classes at your local community college (check to make sure they transfer over).

Don't overly stress yourself out with grades. C's get degrees (unless you're trying to go to grad school or professional school, then you're going to have to try harder than a C)

The best way to cheat on tests is not to write it down somewhere because they might notice and take it away.

Instead, commit the material to memory and copy from there. They'll never know.

If a bartender asks for an ID and you're under age, dont give them shit, just them doing their job. Along the same lines, RAs arent doing their shit for fun most of the time. Ignoring check-in rules are fine, ignoring week day quiet hours is not.

Living on campus can cost more but you are more likely to go to school events when its a quick walk versus driving. On the other hand, its easier to party a bit too hard when its always around you.

Walk through every hall at least once. Maybe you never take a class in that one, but you might miss out on seeing a nice mural or some flyer.

Getting involved in clubs can help make you friends, I was in college band and other than the hard work, it paid plus made a ton of friends along the way

This might be rudimentary for some folks, but anyone like me: meet with counselors regularly to make sure you're on-track for graduation!

I was my own counselor. I used the course catalogs to determine what courses I needed to take to graduate. I thought I was doing well til I found (during what I assumed was my last semester) that I needed additional math credits and anothet credit in some other weird category to graduate. I took summer courses of Pre-Calc and Bowling to graduate a semester later than expected.

Join study groups, and when others ask questions, explain the answers as best you can in your own words.

This was key in study retention.