You prayed for a place in the university, and the Lord granted your request. Now you find yourself physically in the university. Living through the first week of university learning can be a traumatic experience for a new student. Here are few tips to help you go through this critical phase in your intellectual career.

First, you are presented with an explosive variety of ideas and philosophies inside and outside the classroom. You find yourself in the company of women and men with awesome intellectual pedigree. How do you relate to them? In this state of intellectual vulnerability, you enter your first class with anticipation and fear. You expect erudite professors to open the fountain of knowledge and satisfy your intellectual thirst. At the same time, you fear that you may not understand the issues very well. Your expectation is met. The professor delivers eloquently. The class ends. Your fear comes true. You have no clue what the professor has been talking about for the past forty-five minutes or so. Curiously, you are amazed that everything a lecturer says appears to be true.

Furthermore, your course descriptions list dozens of books and many more journal articles. You try to read some but the language is almost impossible to follow. The volume of writing is beyond what you have ever read before. Besides, little or nothing of what you manage to read seems to provide a clue about what your lecturers talk about in formal classes.

The situation is not helped by the behaviour of some lecturers. They assume that you know nothing and take deliberate steps to prove it during your first set of classes. They present lectures as though they are addressing colleagues at the same level of intellectual sophistication. They project intellectual superiority and use long-winding language to confuse you. It is easy for many new students to fall for this intellectual hazing because their emotional state in the first few weeks of university learning is rarely stable.

The intellectual disorientation you may experience is related to two characteristics of advanced tertiary learning. First, at the tertiary level, knowledge is not a well-ordered package that is handed to you in a class by lecturers. All terrains of knowledge are contested. As knowledge advances, so do diversity and disagreement in most disciplines of study. Scholars rarely agree on what is true and valid. Secondly, you are likely to encounter good and bad teachers in your tertiary learning career. This is because teaching abilities are not always emphasized in the recruitment and assessment of university lecturers. Many universities reward demonstrated research abilities more than competence in undergraduate teaching.

You will be pleased to know that your initial experience of bewilderment is not necessarily a sign of intellectual weakness on your part. As days and weeks pass by, your understanding of texts and lectures should improve. Your opinions and views should begin to form almost imperceptibly different courses. Enjoy a fruitful new 2009 academic year.