Teens Talk - The Pros and Cons of College

The Grand Rapids Times
1-23-2009
By Marcel Gamble

Many of you all are already in college or you plan to attend college soon.
To be real with everyone I am not capable of giving you an exact example of what experience you will take from college because in all honesty college is what you make it to be.
Lately I have had a few people ask me to give them advice on how to have successful college careers, and my advice has been the same advice people have given me for years; you have to crawl before you can walk.
Before you can speak you have to obtain a vocabulary.
Before you can write you have to learn the alphabet.
College isn’t any different. Before you attend you have to equip yourself with three things; God, discernment, and willingness to learn new things.
I’m going to be honest the reasoning for equipping yourself with God is because College is no different than the rest of the world. In college there are people who will try to deprive your life of God, people who will be working daily to strip you of everything that you believe in.
I call these people wishers because they wish they can gain possession over everything that a person owns even the pureness of someone’s soul.
During college God will also help you get through challenging times such as endless disputes with others, depression, and personal battles with faith.
Having discernment is a part of crawling because as much as college is about academics it is also about making successful choices. No one can expect to make the choice to party every night and then expect to be attentive in class the next morning.
Discernment is also about choosing the right people to hang with to be influences in your life. If you know that your boy goes to class during the day and sells drugs at night it probably wouldn’t be a smart idea to hang too tuff with your boy if you have goals in life.
It is a humorous saying but what monkey sees monkey will do.
As soon as you believe that you are strong enough to be around such corruption you will to become corrupted before you can even realize it.
One last thing that you must equip yourself with is the willingness to want to learn.
You can’t expect to do well academically in college if you enter college with a closed mind.
College isn’t like grade school no one is going to force you to do anything so if you choose to be lazy then no doubt, your grades will reflect that.
The professors in college are not there to hold your hand they are there to give you an education so that you may progress in life.
My advice to everyone is to crawl before you walk meaning prepare yourself for everything that you do in life. Don’t just jump into things expecting to be successful because you will fail.
Take it from somebody who has failed and picked himself back up to be successful.
Crawl before you walk, and become whatever you vision yourself being.
I’m going to leave you with this; “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” he said (Luke 18:17).