Everyone knows the college clichs. You are almost expected to gain weight when you first start and to be living off of ramen noodles because you are so poor from paying your way through school. However, it does not have to be this way. They may be clichs, but there are "smart poor college students" that know the tricks of the trade and how to avoid eating the same noodles for every meal.

"It's nine o'clock on a Friday morning and it's freezing outside. Why are you here? Shouldn't you be at home in bed with some hot chocolate or something?" The class laughed. Then he announced there would be a pop quiz. The students began to wonder why they came in that morning.

The professor offered only one question: "Why are you here?" Everyone would get full participation points, and the student with the cleverest answer would get five extra points. The winning answer? Here it is:

But more and more mature adults who have returned to school are finding that their achievement of an associate's degree is the only boos they need in order to achieve their career and life goals.

If you have included your bills in your budget you will have scheduled when exactly you have to pay them. Make sure that you never miss a deadline and always pay on time. This way you can avoid having to pay any unnecessary late fees or charges. If you pay your bills online and have a tendency to forget, leave yourself notes around your house and reminders on your phone. You can set them so that an alarm goes off to remind you at the same time and day every month or week.

Use regular sized paper. Often professors tend to jump from idea to idea or circle back to add something pertinent to a point already passed. You may need side margins or extra space to draw in arrows or asterisks. Also, visually speaking, ideas will be clumped together, explained fully on one page. This should help you understand concepts as a whole, rather than flipping back and forth between multiple pages to learn one idea.

Unnecessary amounts of money are lost or spent when people are careless with their belongings. A lot of damage can be done with a credit card, identification card, or social security card in not a lot of time when it's stolen. Sometimes even if you are careful about your belongings you can fall victim to credit card scams. Do not purchase anything online that does not look credible. Search the name of the website you are planning to purchase from through a search engine to see if it has a lot of online traffic. If it doesn't, chances are it's a credit card scam.

Find your system. With the amounts of information you will have to keep track of, making a system of abbreviations, colors or symbols to help you keep track of information can be very helpful. Don't waste time writing down long scientific words when you can abbreviate. However! Make sure that you write down some sort of key to refer to. You may think that you will understand what you wrote later on, but chances are you won't. Make sure that three weeks down the road you still understand your notes.

Copy the board. If your teacher goes to the effort to write something on the board you want it. A modern trick to capture that information fast is to take a picture with your phone. Boom.

The general versatility of IT professionals, accountants, and electrical engineers, as well as the constant need for trained medical professionals and nurses, ensures that those who invest in education in these areas will have a place in nearly any industry they desire. But the first step to achieving the goals of a sustained career is to receive the education needed to get there, and in the fields listed above, an associate's degree is usually enough to get one started down the road to success.