8/11/2026 update:
The College Success Rulebook: Practical Advice for College and Beyond
Practical Advice for College and Beyond
By Nathan Nobis
Freely available in Google Docs and PDF and at MERLOT; also available in Kindle and Audible and soon in paperback; other freely available formats are forthcoming!
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College gives students a remarkable amount of freedom—but succeeding in college requires knowing what to do with it.
The College Success Rulebook offers straightforward, practical advice for becoming a more successful and independent college student. It explains many of the habits and expectations that professors often assume students already understand, even though students may never have been explicitly taught them.
How should you prepare for class? What should you do when you don’t understand something? How can you use office hours effectively? What does it mean to study well rather than simply study longer? How should you use AI without allowing it to do the learning for you? And what habits will help you not only earn better grades, but become someone others can depend on?
Drawing on years of experience working with college students, Nathan Nobis offers concise guidance on attending and preparing for class, reading and writing, studying, managing time, communicating with professors, using technology and AI wisely, seeking help, responding to feedback, and developing your own ideas.
The larger goal is not simply to follow a collection of rules. It is to develop habits of excellence: habits that can help you learn difficult things, think independently, do good work, and prepare for life beyond college.
The College Success Rulebook offers straightforward, practical advice for becoming a more successful and independent college student. It explains many of the habits and expectations that professors often assume students already understand, even though students may never have been explicitly taught them.
How should you prepare for class? What should you do when you don’t understand something? How can you use office hours effectively? What does it mean to study well rather than simply study longer? How should you use AI without allowing it to do the learning for you? And what habits will help you not only earn better grades, but become someone others can depend on?
Drawing on years of experience working with college students, Nathan Nobis offers concise guidance on attending and preparing for class, reading and writing, studying, managing time, communicating with professors, using technology and AI wisely, seeking help, responding to feedback, and developing your own ideas.
The larger goal is not simply to follow a collection of rules. It is to develop habits of excellence: habits that can help you learn difficult things, think independently, do good work, and prepare for life beyond college.
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© 2026 Nathan Nobis. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may share and adapt this work for any purpose, including commercially, provided appropriate credit is given. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
I would like to complete this A Rulebook for Students: Success in College & Beyond book and I'm seeking co-authors to help me complete it.
Information on the book and its current status is here:
As I see it, completing the project would involve (a) elaborating on the "rules" and (b) adding any additional material and discussion that's needed. It would then be posted as an open-access e-book, as well as a low cost paperback on Amazon.
If you are interested in helping with this, please let me know. Here are some contributor guidelines I just developed, since some of my students expressed interest in helping with the project:
. . .I'm trying to assemble a list of guidelines to help students be more successful students. My motivation here is that sometimes students don't do as well as they should and that sometimes seems for reasons that are pretty easy to address, at least in theory. So what to do about that? One response is a (free) book like this, although this surely is not a complete response: other interventions and guidance are needed.I've put the file here and I've set it to allow 'comments.' That will result in any changes you make being 'tracked' and then I can accept the changes after reviewing them. If your name doesn't show up automatically, please add your name in a note by what you add, using Google Doc's feature to do that, so you can be credited as a contributor or co-author.You can also add additional 'rules' using the headings feature: heading 1 is big sections, heading 2 is for particular rules. These can then be integrated into the table of contents. (If you don't know how to use the headings and table of contents features in Word or Google docs, you should learn, since it's really helpful). The table of contents is important, since my hope is that someone could even just read the table of contents and get a lot of good advice and reminders.So eventually when this is "done enough" I will format it and make it available on Amazon, in addition to a free e-book in a variety of formats.OK, again, thank you for your offers to help with this project! And if you have ideas for how to change the project to make it better, in any way, please share those thoughts.
Thank you,
NN
nathan.nobis@morehouse.edu ; nathan.nobis@gmail.com
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