CUNY Graduate School and University Center Top Questions

What should every freshman at your school know before they start?

Robert

Having entered college a full 24 years after my high school graduation and receiving my BS 30 years after receiving my high school diploma, I have the advantage of 20/10 hindsight. Though I have no regrets for the path of autodidactic learning in which I engaged during that period, I believe that if I could travel back in time, I would have counseled myself to enter college closer to my graduation from high school. If I had done so, I would have reaped the benefit of focusing my career aims at an earlier age. Having said this, however, I believe that there is a benefit to my having waited. As an older man, I had the advantage of being able to far more clearly deliniate my path. This has proven a great advantage to me, and has pushed me to the highest academic standards, and surpassing my wildest dreams of achievement, when in 2011, I graduated from the CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies Summa cum Laude.

Lauren

Talking to myself as a high school senior with the knowledge that I have of the "real world" now at 25 would be beneficial, but I'm not sure that I would want to give away all my hard earned knowledge -- otherwise how would I turn out a well-rounded adult without having navigated those personal experience myself? If I did have to give away one piece of advice though, I would have told myself to wait a year or two before attending college initially, and spend some time traveling abroad immersed in another language and culture. That, I believe, would have given me invaluable experience as not only a student, but a person.