Once you’ve been admitted to college, the next step is to develop a strategy of how to find your best life there. Some avoid challenging experiences, follow a path of familiar expectations, and rely on shortcuts. Others aim for perfection, ignore their friends and health, labor over what subjects to study, and neglect spending time outside the classroom. The pressure to make college valuable and interesting can feel overwhelming. Now James T. Hamilton shares important lessons to help you find purpose, manage time, maintain friendships and family relationships, stay physically and mentally healthy, and choose classes, majors, and careers. He is Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Hearst Professor of Communication at Stanford University. The winner of eight teaching awards at Harvard, Duke, and Stanford, he’s spent decades teaching and mentoring undergraduates and designing programs to help them thrive in college.

Sexual assault, physical attacks, gross mismanagement, and false promises. These are just a few of the crimes and abuses that Judy Karofsky’s elderly mother endured in assisted living facilities after suffering an incapacitating stroke. With Karofsky’s help, her mother eventually cycled through six facilities in the hope of finding adequate care. Each one turned out to be as dysfunctional as the last. Now she chronicles her efforts to find appropriate care for her beloved mother in a system that is at best inefficient and at worst inhumane. As she tirelessly advocated for her mother and filled gaps in her care, she saw firsthand ageism, exploitation, poor management, and sometimes outright cruelty. She was a city council member and one of Wisconsin’s first women mayors. During her term of office, she established a now-thriving senior center and emergency medical services.

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is challenging, even without factoring in devastating losses or significant life changes. But when these events (such as the death of a loved one, a difficult divorce, or a trauma) surface, it can be quite challenging for many health-conscious people to eat healthily. Bestselling author, health journalist, certified health coach, and life coach Connie Bennett experienced this unexpected setback when her mother passed away from cancer. Realizing that even the most resolute health advocates are susceptible to falling off the wagon, she dove into the research for more than seven years to discover why she and millions of others eat so poorly. She has been featured by hundreds of media outlets, including TIME, CBS News Sunday Morning, Oprah & Friends Radio, Woman’s World, Publishers Weekly, Women’s Health, Forbes Health, and The Daily Mail.