By Kyle Kittredge
Staff Writer
 
Imagine letting yourself become lazy. You don’t shower, you sleep in, you’re not motivated to hang out with friends, and worst of all your grades go down. It is a common occurrence in college, including here at UNH.
Associate Professor of Management Paul Harvey has written some performance advice for students titled “UNH Professor Offers Advice to Students on How to Avoid Poor Academic Performance.”
The advice was written two years ago as a supplement to a presentation Harvey gave to the fraternity Sigma Nu, and can be found on the UNH Media Relations home page.
“They asked me to put something together for their chapter to help those who were struggling academically, and what goes beyond the usual things,” Harvey said.
In his advice Harvey mentions five things that most students struggle with. They include: a lack of interest in the subject matter, focusing on quantity of work and studying versus quality, “missing the forest for the trees,” evaluating your current work based on past grades, and learned helplessness.
The first question asks, “Are you truly interested in what you are studying?” This is the biggest point, according to Harvey.
“A lot of parents lean their kids one way and more of the reason is the amount of debt they don’t want to be in after college, a relatively safe way of having a career, or they didn’t know what else to do,” Harvey explained,“and it’s business schools in general.”
Harvey sees this problem occasionally in his classes that he teaches.
“Traditionally I’ve been teaching upper level management classes, with the exception of a freshmen lecture business class,” Harvey said.
“Those sorts of classes I would get second semester sophomores or first semester juniors, maybe a little later, but depending on their academic background, up until that point, a lot of them had really fallen into a lot of theses habits that I’ve been addressing,” he said.
“Its not always a permanent situation but its always simple steps people can take to avoid. Missteps account for a lot of student misery and it’s much easier to change career paths now than it is out of college,” said Harvey.
When asked why this advice was particularly important, Harvey said, “I think it’s a set of simple solutions for common problems that a lot of students struggle with.”
Students agree that this advice is important.
“I think that it is well laid out and honest. There are some really good points in there,” Melanie Green, a senior nutrition major, after reading the advice said.
Others agreed too, such as sophomore history major Sam Pollari.
“I agree with most of what was said,” Pollari said.
If there was any more advice, Pollari could not think of any, believing the article to be a good one.
“I think that pretty much covers it,” he said.
However, Harvey had one final piece of advice to include.
“Find the thing that’s important to you,” he said.