The Secrets to College Success
Published: April 2026
Description
In Secrets of College Success, you will explore what it truly means to thrive in college. Yale Dean Karin Gosselink draws on 30 years of experience across a wide range of institutions to offer guidance on the strategies, mindsets, and skills that enable students to make the most of their college experience. Through conversations with real college students, you will learn how they navigated common misconceptions about higher education and developed approaches that worked for them. You will gain concrete skills in areas like time management and academic reading and writing, while also learning to identify the broader opportunities college offers and how to take advantage of them. By the end of the course, you will have a clearer sense of your own strengths and values and how to spend your college years focusing on what matters most to you.
Course Takeaways
- Develop a personalized academic roadmap by understanding how to navigate financial aid, course selection, and institutional resources from day one.
- Build a sustainable system for active learning by adapting your preparation, note-taking, and review strategies to the demands of different college courses.
- Strengthen college-level reading, writing, and research practices, including the ethical use of AI tools, to meet the analytical demands of your coursework.
- Leverage academic, career, wellness, and community resources to build the support network you need to thrive inside and outside the classroom.
- Develop transferable skills and professional experience from your first year by engaging campus resources and pursuing opportunities aligned with your interests.
Meet the Instructors
Karin Gosselink is the inaugural Director of the Office of Educational Opportunity (OEO), a partnership between the Poorvu Center and Yale College. In this role, she helps guide Yale’s collaboration with the Warrior-Scholar Project, whose curriculum and academic strategies are shaped by the expertise of Ryan Pavel (Chief Executive Officer) and Cassie Sanchez (Director of Education). Karin has supported WSP’s mission for many years and has participated in Warrior-Scholar bootcamps on Yale’s campus, where she has seen firsthand the impact of their battle-tested approach to student success. Karin also teaches her own online course about College Success.
