PopSyndicate.com

When students head off to college, they are ready to take on the world. It’s the first time away from home for most, and they plan to live it up – and don’t bother to worry about consequences.

Sure, parents try to prep them for their first jaunt into the “real world,” but who wants to listen to the parental units? No, it’s much more fun to experience life on a whim learn as you go, spread your wings and have no worries about getting grounded for missing curfew, getting a bad grade on a paper or swigging a little booze even though the legal limit is just a few years away.

Well now students can get a leg up on college before they ever hit the quad. The third edition of the best-selling How to Survive Your Freshman Year divvies up the details of campus life while offering up advice on how to date, what technology should be used, how to balance online social networking with the real thing and more.

This is the guide I wish I could have had back in ‘93when I first hit the grounds of a small campus in southwest Missouri. (And if I’d had a book about choosing the right college, I would have been a helluva lot better off.) The sometimes funny, wise words from hundreds of people would have offered up some amazing advice. I may have taken; I may not have, but at least I would have had it.

The great thing about this book is that it’s literally written by hundreds of people. Part of the Hundreds of Heads series, How to Survive Your Freshman Year is a compilation of advice from, well, hundreds of current and former higher learning students from more than 140 colleges and universities across the U.S. Some give their full names, while others prefer to remain anonymous contributors.

The 302-page tome is the must-have guide for all freshman – and a great reference for parents who want the dirt on exactly what happens on college campuses.

This week, creators Mark Bernstein and Yadin Kaufmann chat it up at the PS blog, share excerpts from the latest Freshman Year edition and what you need to know to survive the first year at college.