College: How I Got the Most Out of My Parents' Investment

If your class is a seminar or has a discussion section, you'll have to go most of the time. Usually led by a TA (teacher's assistant), but at Harvard we had TFs, teaching fellows, I think because the title sounds more prestigious.

These classes that actually require your presence and participation are extended opportunities for the most obnoxious dilettantes in the room to posture, name-drop pretentious French authors that no one actually reads, and generally try and fail to impress the rest of the class. Avoid them with extreme prejudice.

Then again, I was a liberal-arts guy. In a math class, or any other class in which there are genuine right and wrong answers to the questions, it's probably harder to let all your peers know you're sophisticated by beginning your sentences with the phrase, "I was just reading Derrida..."

How do you deal with these classes? Multitask! Most schools are now wired for Wi-Fi in their classrooms, so if you have a laptop, you'll be able to distract yourself from what your peers are actually saying. As long as your screen isn't in the teacher's line of sight, you can get away with almost anything by pretending to type down notes.

You probably believe that good grades will help you get good jobs after graduate. The conventional wisdom on grades is that they only matter for your first job. That's probably true, although I'm not in any position to know. Forget nepotism, because of grade inflation the median GPA in my class was a 3.68, which is slightly higher than an A-minus.