Qualities Of An Ideal and Excellent Student

An excellent college student would have written an excellent introduction to this paper. An excellent student would have framed this paper in a coherent discussion of the subject, stating topic sentences first and then proceeding to discuss them. So does the evaluation of the excellent student rest solely in purely academic categories? This paper proposes that it does not, and to be such a student one has to transcend academic distinction and perform just as well socially and emotionally. The word college according to Douglas Harper (2001) comes from the Latin word collegiums meaning “community, society, guild”.

A college then can be considered a community or a population of people where knowledge is disseminated through the populace and is actively being interpreted and re-interpreted by those who reside within the area. Those who reside in the area may include professors of different disciplines, students from various backgrounds with different structural approaches and viewpoints, singular staff and other sorts of people whom are continuously faced with different sets of relationships with each member of the community.

Because of the dynamic relationships that exist between each member, communication then relays the intellect of each member to the other, and along with the set curricula, form an active body of knowledge. If the student is indeed a clever one, that student may see the great learning opportunity in this and make good use of whatever form of relationships that may be created in these interactions.

The student needs to be socially aware and socially active to be able to gather a well-rounded body of knowledge, which does rely on a sole source of information but is comprised of several bodies of thought that can then be used to complement and critique each other.

In this process, the student develops critical thinking and his own mode of analysis. Should the student choose to be isolated from this wealth of information and rely solely on the existing scholarship and choose to build from there, then the student can only be a good academic student and never a college student.

The student can never be an excellent academic student for the philosophies that one fashions from what is formally taught, though they may seem original, are mere syntheses of the existing bodies of knowledge and bring little innovation to the academe. The student can never be an excellent college student for his learning, while taking place inside the college space, did not arise from interactions between the community, the college, and the student but between the student and a rigid set of knowledge.

Learning requires effort and perseverance, and learning in a dynamic environment requires emotional maturity. As one is to interact with different sets of people, it highly likely that different sorts of reactions will be received. To be an excellent college student, one must learn how to take these reactions and soldier on. For if one is to let negative remarks and discouragement get in the way, then one can never achieve true learning thus can never be an excellent student.

One must know that there are words to take to heart, words to learn from and words that are simply meant to be ignored. One should also know how to manage emotions, and how to properly deal with them. Excesses in spoiling loneliness, such as dwelling in the gloom and refusing any help, happiness such as prioritizing the more entertaining activities than the required activities of the course, and anger, stoking the fire and physically or verbally challenging anything that one chooses to, similarly leads to the decay of learning and integrity of the student.

Emotional maturity allows for these to be prevented as the student can minimize the harshness of the environment by actively formulating how to deal with it, knowing how to manage emotions, knowing how to delegate time and knowing how to manage resources. An excellent student could have written an excellent introduction. An excellent could have written a little less than exciting introduction but could have delivered the substantiation of the assigned topic in an organized and well-thought out manner. This could go on providing examples of what an excellent student may have done with the introduction.

But an excellent student on the whole can demonstrate a proficiency on the lesson at hand and still offer further knowledge than what has been taught in the classroom. Further knowledge in that the student shows the ability to manage stress, and emotions while balancing time between work and play. The student also knows that knowledge is beyond the books and willingly goes out to the world to add to what is already known. That is an excellent student.

Reference

Harper, Douglas. 2001. Online Etymology Dictionary. Electronic Document, http://www. etymonline. com/index. php? term=college, accessed June 6.