So here’s my advice, to add to that of Dean Lewis: Find a few friends, from your entryway or your section, who are interested in forming a study group for a course. Have each person summarize some of the material and pool your knowledge. Get together the night before a test, order pizza, and discuss the reding. Not only will you absorb more of the important information more quickly than you would have otherwise, but the process of digesting the information, in an informal setting, will teach you more about the material (and about your fellow students) than a section ever could.

Most of you will figure this all out by spring semester anyway, but it is important not to try to be a superhero in the fall. Learn your way around Cambridge and Boston, go to a Red Sox game with your roommates and learn to sail on the Charles. If you burn out first semester, you may find it difficult to regain the motivation that got you here.

“Give yourself a break,” Lewis writes. “Take a few hours just to go to an athletic event, a movie, a theatrical production on campus, a rock concert downtown. Sit outside and read a novel, go to a place of worship, find a pleasant place off-campus where you can be alone with your thoughts. Hang out with your friends, play frisbee, keep up the dining hall conversation till everyone else has left. It won’t hurt, and will probably only help, your academic performance.” His advice is valuable; don’t let mammoth reading lists prevent you from taking it.

David M. DeBartolo ’03, a government concentrator in Lowell House, is associate editorial chair of The Crimson.