Christmas is a great time to travel, because everyone is at home with their families, so hotels and flights are cheap. Trips like this are important because your productivity improves if you take a week off every few months. Bring friends!

Four Reference Books for Business School Students

These are books you can read over and over that teach skills to help you in college. Success in academics requires sacrifice, support, and especially, time off. You can constantly rely on the information inside these reference books to guide you, while you’re in school though, and even out of school.

College wouldn’t be complete without public speaking experience, you typically give a speech in every class. There is a book that will teach you to speak to audiences, called, How to Write and Give a Speech: A Practical Guide For Executives, PR People, the Military, Fund-Raisers, Politicians, Educators, and Anyone Who Has to Make Every Word Count, by Joan Detz. The book will also help your social and conversational skills, giving you tips on what to say and do when you get nervous, have nothing to say, or do not know the answer to a question, for example.

In college, you have to be committed, but that doesn’t mean you want to have zero fun. Take time off, go on trips with your friends, give yourself time at the beach. You’ll make sacrifices all throughout college and your family will too. . . . time you could’ve spent working, energy you could’ve spent helping around the house, and money you could’ve spent elsewhere… Hopefully you get a scholarship, great teachers, and friendly staff at your school, but for every hard time you have in college, it’s important to live a little.

If you want to improve your social skills, become more persuasive, and communicate better, the book you need is, How to say it: Choice words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs for every situation, 3rd ed., by Rosalie Maggio. This book covers everything, from writing letters to organizations and clubs, to asking for advice, to dozens of other writing templates you can use for school, work, and your everyday life.

The alpha of all the style manuals, The Chicago Manual of Style, by University of Chicago Press, really does attempt to cover every single possible writing situation you’ll ever find yourself in. There is no such thing as perfect grammar, but this book will get you where you want to be. Writing styles all have their own rules, so picking Chicago and being consistent will impress your readers.

If you want an inexpensive vacation, consider golf. You can buy a set of clubs at a thrift store or yard sale. Golf courses pay dividends in the form of networking connections you’ll meet, such as businesspeople who play. It also helps to volunteer a lot too, because you meet great people that way as well.

By putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard), writing allows you to expand on your thoughts and reflect on them later. Learning to communicate is a skill proven to be of the utmost importance in all areas of life. One of the great books on writing and speaking is, The Elements of Eloquence: How to turn the perfect English phrase, by Mark Forsyth. The book talks a lot about the writing techniques of the authors of the Bible, it talks about the writing techniques of William Shakespeare, and it covers about forty writing techniques that help aid comprehension for readers and add a jolt of excitement to your work.

I want to offer you this list of books that you can rely on for the rest of your life. For a limited time, I’ll also donate a percentage of every order at Do It Right Computers to providing curriculum for middle and high school students on personal finance and entrepreneurship. After that, I’ll continue to help by donating the books to students who need them.

Your college success bundle includes:

The Elements of Eloquence: How to turn the perfect English phrase, by Mark Forsyth.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed., by University of Chicago Press.

How to Write and Give a Speech: A Practical Guide for Executives, PR People, the Military, Fund-Raisers, Politicians, Educators, and Anyone Who Has to Make Every Word Count, by Joan Detz.