College is a time of self directed learning. Your mentor, a teacher who devotes time to ensuring that you take enough of the right classes to graduate in your field of study, will help you along the way. But ultimately, the decisions you make are your own, and you will find that the number of decisions you face about what classes to take is very confusing. That is partly because so many classes look so interesting, yet aren’t useful towards attaining a particular degree. To avoid coming up short on your four year degree graduation day, you need to pay particular attention to your curriculum starting during your first semester of classes.

Some people – usually the ones who end up being crunched during their third or fourth year of college – start their college years off by taking a wide selection of diverse classes. The aim behind this approach is that they want to ‘figure out’ what area of specialty they want to focus on. But that’s something to figure out before one attends college. Figuring out what one is interested in during college can be very expensive, as the classes chosen are often very costly, and often don’t apply towards one’s final area of special focus.

You’ll notice that people who change majors often end up being in college for far longer, sometimes three or four years longer, than average! That’s because credits attained towards the field of study of one major don’t fulfill graduation requirements for other majors. Focus on one field of study from the outset to avoid making this classic mistake.