Be a College Achiever: The Complete Guide to Academic Stardom [Paperback]

Be a College Achiever: The Complete Guide to Academic Stardom delivers the key that finally cracks the college-success code. With the college costs increasing yearly, students and parents must protect this major investment of time, energy, and money. College and college-bound students now can learn how to plan for and complete an ideal college education - and one that leaves them with valuable options and opportunities upon graduation.

Be a College Achiever is a start-to-finish, goal-oriented "College 101" handbook. Chapters cover such diverse topics as goal-setting, picking and "lasting" in a major, courses not to place out of, test taking, preventing and handling academic problems, distance learning, structuring and composing essays, and study-abroad options.

The book concludes with a section devoted entirely to college-level nationally competitive scholarships. These scholarships, many described in detail, can enable scholarship winners to pay for the final years of their college education and to help them finance post-graduate professional school education. Any student can learn from the book's step-by-step insider instructions for finding, applying for, and interviewing for prestigious scholarships.

Be a College Achiever incorporates interviews and discussions with national scholarship winners (many of whom were personally coached by the author, Dr. James Duban). These exemplary college achievers include Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Goldwater, Madison, Rotary, National Science Foundation, and Hispanic Scholarship Fund winners, among many others. Dr. Duban straightforwardly sets out the tried-and-true strategies for achieving the highest levels of academic success.

Beyond helping undergraduates set specific goals, Be a College Achiever shows students how to accomplish those goals. Along with a systematic guide to studying and test-taking in the humanities and the sciences, the book demonstrates how to research, compose, and edit college essays and research papers. Add to that the down-to-earth chapters on ways of developing mentoring relationships with professors and why it is so vital for students to engage in research at the earliest opportunity. Few students who enter college realize that, beyond high grades, research experiences will dictate the course of their future letters of recommendation and post-baccalaureate options.

This book provides a philosophy of education along with proven strategies that will take students from their freshman year through the beginning of their professional lives. Be a College Achiever is a "must read" for college and college-bound students, as well as parents, high-school guidance counselors, private-school principals, and persons charged with securing higher college retention and achievement rates.