With the novelty of the new college year worn off, midterms looming, and unexpected grades making you either seriously review your strengths, or completely upsetting your equilibrium, this time of year can present you with the need for introspection, and the urge to get off campus and enjoy an unusual and inspiring event. All that and some good feasting combined.

The Art of Graduating seminars speak to students who want to optimize their college experience, as well as to those who want to rescue it. With a revolutionary approach towards facing the unforeseen challenges of college, and optimizing your potential, the Art of Graduating seminar travels the journey with you, preparing you for the pitfalls you have started encountering, advising you on the innumerable opportunities you often miss in the single-minded quest for academic excellence, and guiding you through to the finish line with enthusiasm and humor.

While many believe that struggling in college is reserved for those who have not made their potential clear enough to gain entrance to prestigious colleges, the opposite is often the case. You know it, and most of the students around you putting on a brave face in the midst of fear of failure know it. In fact, it is often those in institutions where the myth of 'effortless perfection' originated who suffer the most debilitating angst of all. The difference is, many don't admit to it. Most arrive in their new environments and experience a culture shock that throws them off kilter, revealing a need for them to both regain their equilibrium, and create a new one. Also, there is the undeniable need to form a strong sense of a whole new identity. You are both the student who can be empowered by self-esteem, encouragement and the appropriate skills needed to study effectively, and the student who can experience debilitating obstacles in realizing your potential without access to appropriate academic and psychological tools. Some suffer more than others, but without exception, every student who has ever graduated, or more revealingly, not graduated from college, wishes they had dealt with it slightly, or completely differently in retrospect. They wish they had known more about how to approach and deal with the enormity and complexities of the experience, and what to carry with them into their futures.

The Art of Graduating seminar is geared to planting the seed that gives you a head start in a lifelong process. You will get to understand just how universal your insecurities are, and more importantly, just how unique your potential is. You will appreciate that moments you thought were unique challenges exposing your shortcomings are really shared experiences, offering you an opportunity to thrive. You will realize that feeling alone and isolated, even in the chaos of a crazy social schedule, is the domain of the bright student who strives for answers to the most pressing questions - whether personal, social or intellectual. That is what you are in college for. You will laugh at the sometimes-terrifying predicaments you find yourself in, and work out how to deal with them. You will become aware that, if you were the valedictorian of your school, a class full of valedictorians makes the game a little more challenging. And if you weren't, the game is a lot more challenging. But that is also where the secret lies. You arrive with distinctive skills and individuality others often covet, and it is those you tap into to optimize your college years, not in competition with others, but in a quest to optimize your own potential. It is the students who rise to their own occasion who ace the tests they feared, and get the jobs they dreamed of.

The Art of Graduating seminar covers a spectrum of study skills, illuminating and eliminating learning techniques that work for some, and not for others. It lends insights into what professors expect from you, how their lecturing styles differ, and what you should expect from, and contribute to, your classes. It stresses not only the importance of mastering the practicalities of college, but also your unique learning style. It allows you to share and collate your own bank of techniques from which to work most effectively and efficiently, depending on the subject and the purpose of the material. Importantly, it reminds you that while many may have felt prepared for 'studying' through varying approaches of information-cramming (by pulling the proverbial all-nighters) or mnemonic techniques (by creating memory tricks to remember facts for the duration of the test), few have really been prepared for the diverse challenges of achieving good grades, of long-term learning, and of life itself. This learning results not from the short-term goal of achieving good grades. It results from comprehending material in such a way that continually connects it with other material, and importantly, placing it within the context of an individual's life, interests and potential. When the goal is to place material in context, to comprehend material for the sake of its usefulness, and to ground that information, however erudite, disconnected, or purposeless it may seem at the time, good grades come naturally. Ironically, then, A's come not from focusing on the A, but from taking the focus off the grade, and concentrating on the innumerable 'aha' experiences that come from constant learning. The remarkable insights resulting from these intellectual discoveries in turn ensure excellent grades, while reminding you that you are far more than your GPA. In knowing that, your GPA will rise to the occasion too.

Sadly, the secrets to success in college are often only discovered when the potential for academic improvement is past, or the chance at optimizing the college experience itself is over. The Art of Graduating seminar offers you an insight into how you can optimize your college career while you have the chance- not only to achieve outstanding grades, but more importantly to reassess what you are doing here, where you are going in your career, and how your college years will affect your life and your future. It offers the secrets of not just acing grades, but more importantly, becoming long-term learners. It reveals that sometimes the path you embarked on may not be the path you feel drawn to pursue, and that 'finding your bliss', discovering your passion, and becoming the full human being you could be is the optimal reward of the successful college career.