Welcome

Welcome to Jeff Anderson’s Conquering College project.

The goal of this work is to help you develop highly effective, efficient, and powerful learning strategies that you can use to earn the grades you want while also developing the type of content expertise you value for your future academic and career interests.

I say that you know how to conquer college when you can earn any grade you want in any class with any teacher. In other words, you conquer college when you can look at any class you want to take, state your desired grade in that class before the term begins, and then successfully earn that grade by the end of the academic term.

Conquering College is a sub-project of a larger project that I call Jeff Anderson’s Strategic Deep Learning project. In other words, Conquering College is Phase 1 of a four-phase process that I share with my students to help them create a life that they love. Below is a draft diagram that illustrates all four phases along with the individual components of each phase.

Conquering College, Study Skills Activities

My main goal as a coach, mentor, and instructor of college math students is to inspire, support, and guide you to create significant learning experiences in your education. To do so, I encourage you to focus exploring and developing six dimensions of learning in your courses: caring, learning how to learn, foundational knowledge, application, integration, and the human dimension. When considering all of the categories of significant learning, I believe that learning how to learn is by far the most important dimension of your work.

With this in mind, I hope to guide you to create systems that empower you to do deep, deliberate practice on a day-to-day basis.  Below are a series of activities that I call "study skills homework." These activities are designed to help you critically reflect on your learning. Many of these exercises will help you create and refine systems to thrive in your Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics courses at an accredited institution of higher education in the United States.

Let’s start with the Conquering College Laboratory Activities first. These activities guide students through some fundamentally important skills to create effective, efficient, research-based learning skills.

• Conquering College Lab 1: Schedule to Succeed

• Conquering College Lab 2: Prepare for Deep Learning

• Conquering College Lab 3: Prepare for Flipped Learning 

• Conquering College Lab 4: Create Your Dream Binder

• 40+ books to enhance and deepen your college education

• Student Testimonials for Conquering College (draft: 07/08/2024)

My favorite way to introduce Conquering College ideas is through these types of lab activities. Below you’ll find some raw material that I plan to use in the future to create more of these types of labs. For students who want to learn how to get high grades on graded, in-class exams, I recommend working through activities 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 in that order (Note: Study Skills Activity 3 below covers similar ideas in less depth than Conquering College Labs 2 + 3. In other words, if you finish Conquering College Labs 2 + 3, you’ll get a much more thorough introduction to what is covered in study skills activity 3 below.

The goal of all this work is to help you develop yourself as an intentional, independent, self-regulated learner.