You Got In! Now What?: 100 Insights into Finding Your Best Life in College

by James T. Hamilton, Jim Toomey (Illustrator)

Overview

For high school graduates and anyone heading off to college, this book is packed with 100 lessons to help shape your college experience and prepare for what comes afterward. It makes the perfect gift for the new college student.

Once you’ve been admitted to college, the next step is to develop a strategy of how to find your best life there. But for decades, Professor James T. Hamilton has seen students struggle with their college journey. Some avoid challenging experiences, follow a path of familiar expectations, and rely on shortcuts. Others aim for perfection, ignore their friends and health, labor over what subjects to study, and neglect spending time outside the classroom. The pressure to make college valuable and interesting can feel overwhelming.

If only students could learn how others have navigated these challenges. You could ask alums to look back on friendships and college-to-career paths and provide advice. Now, you don’t have to wish because You Got In! Now What? tackles the burning questions you have.

Hamilton designs lessons to help you find purpose, manage time, maintain friendships and family relationships, stay physically and mentally healthy, and choose classes, majors, and careers. Each lesson is accompanied by an essay based on research and reflections from students, alums, and professors to provide observations for how you can embrace the best that college has to offer.

With these insights, you'll explore new ideas, meet people, have adventures, and most importantly, beyond just earning a degree, get an education.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635768879
Publisher:	Diversion Publishing
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

James T. (“Jay”) Hamilton is Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Hearst Professor of Communication at Stanford University. The winner of eight teaching awards at Harvard, Duke, and Stanford, he’s spent decades teaching and mentoring undergraduates and designing programs to help them thrive in college.

As chair of the First-Year Requirement Governance Board at Stanford, Hamilton helped implement the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education requirement for first-year students. This set of classes prompts students to reflect on the goals of their college education and their roles as citizens in the twenty-first century.

Hamilton is the author of three award-winning books about media research. He earned a BA in economics and government (summa cum laude) and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Illustrator Jim Toomey is an internationally published humor writer and syndicated cartoonist best known as the creator of the popular comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon, published daily in over 150 newspapers, including The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune.

Editorial Reviews

People who obsess about getting into college can forget that another, more important challenge comes after: actually getting the good of your education, allowing it to create the maximum enlargement of your powers. Funny, practical, wise, and rife with life-lessons from successful contemporaries, Jay Hamilton’s book meets this need head-on. This is an essential companion for anyone asking, ‘I’m in. Now what?’—and maybe even more, for parents wondering how to truly help.

Richard Brodhead

This is exactly the book I wish I had when I started college! In short, snappy, well-referenced chapters, it provides poignant advice and memorable stories about how to get the most out of your college experience.” — Tina Seelig, Executive Director, Knight-Hennessy Scholars, Stanford University, and author of What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World



“Incoming freshmen put an inordinate amount of effort getting into college, but surprisingly little making the most of their time there. This is the book I wish I had before I started college. It's a buffet of earned wisdom that you can use as a compass to navigate these critical years of your life.” — Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work



“This book is a ‘must’ for those heading to college. It will help them make decisions that expand new ideas, friendships and lifelong success.” — Myra Strober, Professor of Education, Emerita, Stanford University, and coauthor of Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions

From the Publisher

So many important parts of life are squished together into a four-year college experience: mind-bending ideas, new skills, brushes with love, difficult trade-offs, finding your people, and the very real consequences of an unsupervised soft-serve ice cream machine in your dining hall. This book offers a wide array of powerful provocations for how to take advantage of that messy, lovely, all-too-brief time when your day job is to be a student, and your real job is to learn to be yourself.

Sarah Stein Greenberg

You Got In! Now What? is a gem. Toss out all those ‘college success’ volumes that tell you to take good notes, go to professors’ office hours, and learn time management skills. Hamilton offers students far deeper and more enduring lessons about how to make the most of your college education. Wise, insightful, engaging, and accessible, this book will transform the way you approach your education and your life. Read it before you begin college and return to it repeatedly. You won’t find a better guide to navigating college.

Louis E. Newman

Incoming freshmen put an inordinate amount of effort getting into college, but surprisingly little making the most of their time there. This is the book I wish I had before I started college. It's a buffet of earned wisdom that you can use as a compass to navigate these critical years of your life.

Simone Stolzoff

This is exactly the book I wish I had when I started college! In short, snappy, well-referenced chapters, it provides poignant advice and memorable stories about how to get the most out of your college experience.

Tina Seelig

This book is a ‘must’ for those heading to college. It will help them make decisions that expand new ideas, friendships and lifelong success.

Myra Strober