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I have a really cool day job. As a tenured full professor and department chair in a psychology department at a comprehensive state university, I get to do a lot in my work. At the end of the day, the work that I do to help facilitate student success stands at the top of my priority list. Last I checked, that’s why I got into this business in the first place!
As my time in this career has grown from months to years to decades, I definitely feel that I’ve gained some hard-fought wisdom that can only come via experience. And I am fully convinced that, as my good friend Scott Barry Kaufman and I agreed upon in our collaborative work years ago (and as stated clearly on his Psychology Today page (also see Scott’s awesome book, Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined), there are multiple paths to greatness.
By this point in my career, I have seen so many success stories among our students and alumni that I can’t even keep them all straight. Students graduating our program and going on to PhD programs at places like the University of Florida, New Mexico State University, Yale University, CUNY, Binghamton, and more. Alumni going on to medical school and gaining careers as physicians. Alumni stationed around the world in various charitable posts, helping build infrastructures for groups of strangers in need—working to improve health and educational outcomes—and more—way more.
If you’re a college student - or are a high school student thinking about going to college —I’ve got news for you, and it’s this: There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for you to not be a huge success in your life. And ready for this? This may sound a bit closed-minded (sorry), but I actually and truly don’t care at all what others might say on this point—I know darn well that I’m right and it’s important for students to have this perspective. If you are reading this now, you have every reason to believe that huge successes are in your future.
Glenn’s Educational History in Brief
To help you see where I’m coming from in my optimism, let me take a minute to tell you about my own educational background and where I am now.
When students walk into my office they probably think something like “well look at this smartypants guy with his Ph.D. diploma on his wall and all his smart-looking books and stuff. He’s all ‘department chair’ and ‘professor,’ he’s got to somehow be super-smart and beyond what I could hope to emulate in my life.”
In case you are a student and you do ever walk into a professor’s office and think this, I’ve got news for you, and it is this: Wrong! Just a regular guy here—and I made it here with a nice combination of dumb luck and hard work. And that's not just me.
My own educational history is not really super-interesting, but there are some elements of it that I think are useful for students to think about. First off, note that I really wanted to go to either the University of Vermont or the University of New Hampshire as an undergraduate. Well guess what? Both schools rejected me hard. My grades were “good but not great” in high school and my SAT scores were … the same. My extra-curriculars in high school corresponded to JV wrestling through 11th grade and a lot of time goofing around with friends at the 7-11 in town (not sure if that counts as a club or anything ...). I was admitted into the University of Connecticut (UCONN) - and to this day I have no idea how in the world that happened. But I’m glad that it did! Someone gave me a chance, I guess - and perhaps this is why I always try to take a “pay it forward” approach to life.
I have to say that I was great in my first year at school. I lived in a dorm complex called “The Jungle,” and, like I said, I was just great … especially at partying! I had lots of great goofball friends and we outdid each other each night by pulling the ultimate pranks on pretty much everyone else in the dorm. We were professional grade! Oh, and I was a great card player—I could play all night until the sun came up! And I was one of the single best Tetris players on my floor! Yeah, I was great … Of course, none of that stuff puts As on the transcript … so my first year or two were marked by mediocre grades and, of course, long talks with my father who, rightfully, was less than fully thrilled with my (then) approach to higher education.
Well at some point, I matured. And I’ve come to see that this just sort of happens in life. And it happens kind of randomly at different times for different people. At the start of my junior year, I started taking my classes really seriously. My attendance was impeccable. My work on my assignments was all-out. And I started to study for exams as if my life depended on the outcome. I look back now and, honestly, I can’t really figure out what happened - but, whatever … I became a serious student and showed myself and others that I was capable of getting lots of As on that transcript. Doors opened for me.
I realized that I liked the scientific study of human behavior so much that I wanted to follow up on this path in my career. And college teaching seemed really cool—like a great opportunity to share a lot of ideas with a lot of people. “Hey!” thought 21-year-old Glenn, “That’s what I’d like to do! I’d like to be a professor of psychology!”
So I buckled down with the GRE (which was way easier for me than was the SAT four years earlier), applied to like 10 Ph.D. programs in social psychology, and I checked my mailbox regularly. My final GPA at UCONN was 3.22—but that was pretty good given what goofballs my friends and I were for so much of those four years ...
From there the story is pretty cookie cutter—I got into a Ph.D. program in social psychology at the University of New Hampshire. After a kind of slow start (none of the other members of my student cohort were goofballs at all really, so I had some catching up to do!), I got the hang of it. I got a great publication along the way—one of the earliest empirical articles on the topic of emotional intelligence (co-authored with the renowned Jack Mayer who coined the term emotional intelligence), my dissertation (conducted under the guidance of the great Becky Warner) ended up winning the highly regarded Sigma Xi Outstanding Dissertation Award for the university in 1997, and I ended up teaching a bunch of classes while a graduate student. These classes included Introductory Psychology, Personality Psychology, Statistics, and Social Psychology. And, for me, the teaching was it—this was so much fun and was exactly the great experience in helping cultivate bright young minds that I was hoping it would be. And I even got into a tenure-track teaching position at Western Oregon University the second I completed my Ph.D.
Remember, this all comes from a kid who was a self-described goofball and who was rejected from the University of New Hampshire (my Ph.D.-granting university) for undergraduate admissions nine years prior.
And I’ve now been in the psychology department at SUNY New Paltz for over 16 years —I have published five books—and am having a great time of it.
I tell this story here not to show you how great I am (honestly, I think the story really is about how average I am, if anything ...) but, rather, to show how dedication to hard work and a resourceful approach to possible future paths for oneself can really set you up for success—even if you may have been something of a goofball in high school (or even in college).
From the Local Community College to the Ivy League
My kids are teenagers and I see among them and many of their friends that conversations about colleges are in the works. “What school am I going to attend?” “What if I don’t get into such-and-such school?” “Oh if I don’t get into that school I will be crushed!” “Oh there’s no way I’d start at a community college—no way! I will die first!”
For kids in this life stage—and for parents of kids at this stage, I’ve got news for you: The particular college a kid ends up at makes little difference at the end of the day. You may be thinking “did he really just say that?!” … and the answer is, “yup, he said that!”
The days of a huge divide between the upper-echelon private schools (think Harvard or Vassar) and the state schools (think Bowling Green University or Western Connecticut State University) are long gone.
My own school, State University of New York at New Paltz, is a case in point. Would you believe that we regularly send students overseas to study abroad in the same programs that include students from ivy league schools? Would you believe that our best students regularly get into the same PhD and medical programs that include students from all kinds of “elite” schools? Would you believe that we regularly place students into graduate programs at some of the best universities in the land - including the Ivy League schools?
I am fully convinced that if you start at a solid state school, work hard, and take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to you (such as joining professors in research collaborations, studying abroad, taking on internships, playing an active role in student clubs, etc.), you’ll be on a fast track to success. I’ve seen it over and over again. The great academic divide does not exist at all like it once did. You don’t have to go to Harvard to become a successful doctor. You don’t need a degree from Stanford to become a university professor. What matters about your college is not so much what kind of prestige the college has. Rather, what matters is almost 100% what you make of it.
As a professor at a state university, I work with a lot of students who transfer in from community colleges. They come from Dutchess County Community College, Ulster County Community College, Orange County Community College, and more. Many of these students are kids who didn’t have the grades or the scores to get into a good four-year school off the bat. So they spent some extra time with mom and dad, saved some money, and spent a couple of years at a well-funded and high-quality community college. Guess what? It works! I’ve seen time and time again that students who go this route so often have the skills they need to succeed in a rigorous four-year institution - and they have what it takes to achieve pretty much any goals (within certain parameters) that they set their minds to.
In fact, in thinking about several of our esteemed alumni, I realized earlier this week that we’ve got many instances not only of our alumni making it into graduate programs at Ivy League schools, but many instances of our transfer students who start at community colleges ultimately make into such programs. I can point out, for instance, multiple students who (a) started out at Dutchess County Community College, (b) transferred to SUNY New Paltz (where they did well), and (c) entered and then flourished in a graduate program at an Ivy League or comparable institution (with many SUNY New Paltz graduates, for instance, ultimately receiving graduate degrees from Columbia University).
Want to go to the Ivy league (or something like that)? Want to achieve greatness in life? Start at your local community college! It’s as effective a starting point as any, in fact. And not a lot of people seem to know that!
Three Principles of Highly Successful Students
Of course, not all of our students make it into great graduate programs at places like Harvard or Columbia. But you know what? A ton of them get advanced degrees from somewhere or another - and as someone who keeps in touch with dozens of my alumni, I know full well that the lion’s share of our alumni are doing all kinds of great things in their academic and professional careers. Based on my extensive experience working with students from various backgrounds, here are three principles of highly successful students:
Hard work. Hands down, this is the winner. There is not even a close second. I will take a hard-working student from Dutchess County Community College over a lazy student from Harvard any day of the week! The more you put in, the more you get out. Students who study for hours and hours for each exam—students who meet with me about their paper assignments to get feedback and write and rewrite their work? Students who make studying their absolute number one priority? They are going to have a hard time not being successful. And I don’t care what school they attend.
Resilience and Perspective. Based simply on statistics and probability, I can almost guarantee that you will not complete college with a 4.0. Do your best, study hard, always reach for the highest mark you can—but be realistic. Students who get stuck with the mentality of “I must get all As no matter what” run into lots of pitfalls. If you run into grades that are lower than what you’re shooting for, suck it up and try harder next time. You’re going to get some Bs. You might get some Cs. If you are anything like 19-year-old me in a course on English literature, then you’ve got a solid D in your future. It’s OK—you can overcome a few low grades. That’s why you compute the grade point AVERAGE. Students who accept, learn from, and move on from bad grades are, to my opinion, at an advantage because they focus best on the future - which, at some point, is all that matters.
Seek out extra-curricular opportunities. When I was in college, I learned about behavioral research being done on rats by my professor Dr. Benjamin Sachs. This guy was an amazing teacher and he made his rat lab sound really cool. I asked if I could join his research team and I got the thumbs up. The experience I got working with him and his doctoral students was indispensable—and it gave me a leg up on research when I ultimately attended a PhD program at the University of New Hampshire. But you don’t have to do rat research specifically! You can join the research team of faculty conducting all kinds of work. In our psychology department alone at SUNY New Paltz, students work with faculty conducting research on such varied topics as disaster mental health, female body objectification, electrophysiology related to bilingualism, and more - way more. If you hear a professor talk about research that he or she is doing, don’t be bashful. You’ve got one life to live. Go to that person’s office and see about possibly helping that person conduct the research. I can just about promise that you won’t be sorry! Of course, lots of other extra-curricular kinds of opportunities exist on all college campuses—so I say take a look around at what’s out there and take your pick! Make these years count! Not only will you likely have fun along the way and make a positive difference in the world, but these extra-curricular experiences may well help get you into some kind of great internship or graduate program at a future point. Take advantage of opportunities, do good work, and more opportunities follow. That’s how things go.
Bottom Line
I hear a lot of anxiety from high school kids about getting into colleges and from college kids about getting into graduate programs. While a moderate amount of anxiety may be helpful, overall, my suggestion is to not freak out about it. If you’ve worked at least somewhat hard, there’s likely a place for you. You might find a college that you’d never even heard of or thought of—and you might find it to surpass your wildest expectations. These days, when it comes to college, it’s not about the name of the school. It’s about what you, the student, make of the experience. So my advice to you, then, is this: Know that you’ll be fine wherever you go—but it’s up to you to make it great. And once you understand that, no matter what school you are at, the sky is the limit.
References and Resources
Geher, G. (2014). Failure as the Single Best Marker of Success. Psychology Today Blog.
Geher, G. (2015). 5 Reasons You Should Never Give Up. Psychology Today Blog.
Kaufman, S. B. (2013). Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Seuss, D. (1990). Oh, The PlacesYou’ll Go! New York: Random House.
