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.
Don’t sleep on your university’s career services office.
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.
Not ethical: If you have to submit assignments (like .docx files) online and you haven’t finished it in time, take a random .docx file and edit it in a text editor (like notepad) and add/delete some random stuff. You can send this file and the professor won’t be able to open it so you will get an extension by default.
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.
Also your mileage will vary depending on the book/edition, but a lot of times a “new edition” of a textbook is just a transparent cash grab by the publisher and is 99% the same material with different page numbers, so it’s worth asking the prof/a TA if the previous edition is pretty much the same. You can generally get “outdated” editions of a textbook for startlingly little money. Like I’m talking sub-$5 for a book that’s $140 new sometimes.
When I was a TA for a gigantic intro class they’d just released a new edition of the book we used but they’d only sent us two desk copies (publishers send free copies to professors who teach out of their textbooks), and the class was run by a professor and three TAs, so the TAs all had to share one copy of the new edition and taught out of the old edition 90% of the time. They’d only changed one chapter, so the professor scanned that one chapter to PDF and we handed it out to anyone with the old edition.
We also had, for some reason, like five boxes of the old edition under a desk in the department office and gave them out to anyone who would take them. You can hardly give old editions of textbooks away.
