ABOUT MEETING PROFESSORS
Don't neglect any honest opportunities you may have to make friends with an Instructor or a Professor. Meeting Teachers represents a privilege and not always necessarily a pull. As for knowing Professors intimately, few do, except other Professors. As for their knowing us intimately, it might seem as if this seldom happens, until it comes time to expel us.
MALINGERING
Don't try to fool the College Doctor into believing that you can't go to lectures, or are going to die, because you've sprained your left thumb. Generally, the College Doctor is a shrewd man, or he would not be the College Doctor.
ABOUT REQUIRED READING
Don't fail to make a list of the required reading in any course. And do some of it—say, a little more than will enable you merely to pass the Exam. It is barely possible that the reading you have done in connection with your College courses will some day prove you an educated man. As for doing all the reading that all the Professors require—well, a fellow must sleep and eat.
WORKING FOR EXAMS
Don't think that Exams can be passed without any preparation. It takes some. The minimum has not yet been determined; nor has the maximum. The middlemum has even been known to vary, according as the instructor imagines that the crowd is or is not taking the course as a snap. The little birdies are surely in league with the Faculty.
INTELLECTUAL NARCOTICS
Don't rely upon special tutors to pass all your courses. It's lazy and not entirely self-respecting. When our friend Gulliver went to Laputa, he met certain Teachers who gave their pupils small intellectual wafers. These they swallowed upon empty stomachs. As the wafers digested, the tincture mounted to the pupil's brain, bearing the proposition along with it. The same system of cramming exists today; only it doesn't always work as advertised. A fellow resorts to special tutors when he has lost confidence, and needs an intellectual narcotic. Special tutors represent the drug-capsule of learning. Why be a dope-fiend?