Going to college is a rewarding experience and one that you will treasure way into your adult life, but college life definitely places you in new and challenging situations that are very different to previous academic settings. It’s important to prepare yourself as much as you can. The most important skills, of course, are those that will help you with your academic work. The plus side is that many of these skills are skills that you are able to apply in your graduate school life or in your career.

Here are three academic skills that are a must for every college student.

Note-taking - The ability to take good class notes is a skill that will be useful in any kind of learning and teaching environment that you’ll encounter in college. Most likely you’ll be taking many different classes and will find it difficult to keep up with all the materials unless you have a way to summarize it. This is where good note-taking skills becomes valuable. There are many ways to develop this. Some students prefer the traditional way and rely and pen and paper; others opt for the easier, more convenient way of typing up notes in class. Others will even record the lecture in class so that they can listen to it again later and type up their own notes without rushing. Today, most students make the mistake of simply taking pictures of presentation slides and doing nothing else. It’s not enough to rely on handouts given by professors, or even class notes that are copied word-for-word from a presentation slide. You’ll need to develop your own structure, something that works for you. In essence, you’re developing your own way of learning and parsing through the large quantities of information you’re faced with on a day-to-day basis in your classes.