I didn’t know about that assignment or get that email! / What do you mean by ‘proactive’?
There are a lot of factors that lead to success for university students in the twenty-first century, or to the lack thereof. Intelligence and hard work are definitely two big ones, sure. But the hard-working and intelligent student will always lose out to the student who has grit and is proactive.
On grit, I’ll defer to the work of Angela Lee Duckworth (see her TED Talk, for starters; I generally despise TED Talks but I’ll make an exception for Duckworth).
But I’m here to talk about being proactive.
When I use this term, I’ve got OED definition 2 in mind: creating or controlling a situation by taking the initiative and anticipating events or problems, rather than just reacting to them after they have occurred; (hence, more generally) innovative, tending to make things happen.
If you didn’t receive or don’t fully understand an assignment, that doesn’t mean “hey, freebie! It’s not my fault, so if I don’t get it done, no big.” If you come to class unprepared, it’s still your bad.
A proactive student will do the following, regarding assignments:
If it’s a week out from a basic assignment’s deadline, but you still don’t have sufficient material in order to complete it, contact your professor immediately. That means right away, not the night before (when your professor likely can’t fix the problem). Also: check in with your classmates.
If your professor asks you to do or prepare something, but you don’t understand all of the assignment, even in the smallest way, email your professor and fellow students for clarification.
If you enrolled late, that doesn’t mean that the solution is for you to just sit back and assume you’ll catch up in due time. The solution isn’t, either, for you to jot off an email to your professor that vaguely asks “what now”?
A proactive student will do the following:
Always attend the meetings of a class that you’re waitlisting, before you’re enrolled! Perhaps there isn’t time to do the readings for a class you’re not even enrolled in, but surely, if you’re interested enough to been seeking out the class, you’re interested enough to sit in on the first week or two just in case. If that can’t happen, partner with a student who has been present from the first day, on your own, to get a sense of what you missed. That’s not just about reading through notes. That’s about conversing, engaging, and asking questions.
Read the syllabus, with depth and attention. Know what you’re getting into, and why.
Having done your own self-started work, meet with the professor in Office Hours not to “get a summary of what you missed,” but to ventilate specific questions about that work that you’ve formed on your own.