Hi,  

I’m Charlie Strong, PhD.  

I wasn’t always the best student in college.

I went to college because that’s what one does. My focus was on making new friends, enjoying the “college experience,” and doing more or less the bare minimum to pass my classes. I was academically adrift during my freshmen and even sophomore year. Through sheer luck and help from faculty mentors, I turned things around.

Fast forward a number of years and I found myself with a PhD, teaching philosophy at an elite university. Sure enough, in my new job, I found that most students resembled the misguided student that I once was. I also recognized that many hardworking and diligent students were similarly misguided; they focused on the wrong details and missed the bigger picture of what goes into student (and career) success; they were prone to burnout and didn’t seem to enjoy their education—they were just jumping through hoops.

But the most troubling thing I discovered as a professor was that many students never really figure out their university studies—they spend four or five years disliking and not learning much from their extremely expensive college experience.

I think that the abundance of college confusion, frustration, and burnout is the product of misunderstanding. I also know that misunderstandings can be rectified.

I founded Habitus Education in order to help people who are orientated to college like I once was. That is, the majority of silently (and unnecessarily) suffering students I encounter as a professor.

My first offering is an online course called The Unwritten Rules of College. It’s an overview of everything I know about how to succeed in college. It starts with a much-needed reorientation of what university studies are and what they ought to be. I reverse engineered not only what worked for me, but also—and more importantly—what has worked for the best students at the universities where I have taught. To make the lessons more robust and objective, I talked to countless professors who teach at other schools and in other disciplines. I also interviewed the best students I could find to ask them their strategies, techniques, and mindsets. And I researched college student success from leading experts in economics, neuroscience, education, psychology, and sociology.

I then took these non-obvious insights and summarized them in an easy-to-follow step-by-step course.

I’m always improving The Unwritten Rules of College and busy working on additional courses. Sign up for my newsletter for the latest information.

If you have any questions for me don’t hesitate to send me an email at charlie@habitusedu.com