The perfect gift for the new college student
Professor James T. Hamilton shares 100 life lessons to shape your college experience and prepare for what comes afterward.
Release Date: March 2025
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 pressing questions you have.
Hamilton designs lessons to help you find purpose, manage time, maintain friendships, 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 on 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 for life.
So, why should you read this book?
Decisions about what to study, how to spend time outside the classroom, and when to power down can feel overwhelming. This book breaks down these decisions about how to navigate college into eight categories: Meaning, Purpose, Thinking, Choosing, Connecting, Identity, Citizenship, and How to Go Wrong.
There are three ways to use this book to navigate college. You can read the lessons in each section and pause to think through how they apply to your own life. A reflection at the end of each segment is designed to help you pull together these insights. Later, you can dive back into a particular lesson as your experiences in college help you recognize the challenges discussed. You may even decide to reread sections after your first quarter, semester, or year, deriving new takeaways based on your time in college.
#2 Don’t live another’s script. #10 How do you live a life of meaning and purpose? #16 Be open to the flow. #25 Expect setbacks. #39 Life is not linear. #58 To go far, go together. #68 Write your own story. #80 Somebody should do something. #100 Don’t …Put it off.
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#2 Don’t live another’s script. #10 How do you live a life of meaning and purpose? #16 Be open to the flow. #25 Expect setbacks. #39 Life is not linear. #58 To go far, go together. #68 Write your own story. #80 Somebody should do something. #100 Don’t …Put it off. 〰️
Praise
“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
President Emeritus, Duke University
“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
“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
Executive Director, Stanford d.school, and author of Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways
“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
“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
Former Dean of Academic Advising and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Stanford University; John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor, emeritus, Carleton College; and the author of Thinking Critically in College: The Essential Handbook for Student Success
“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
Meet James T. Hamilton
James T. Hamilton is the 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.
Illustrated by Jim Toomey
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.
