The most important skill you need to 'pack' for your tertiary education experience is self-knowledge. It's quite possible, in fact, easy, to reach adulthood, in fact, to go through life, without knowing oneself. The Julia Roberts film, 'Runaway Bride', illustrated that powerfully. The heroine, a young woman who is often engaged, but who flees from being married, realises that she didn't know herself when she couldn't answer the question, "How do you like your eggs prepared?" This was because her habit – when in a relationship – was to always order her eggs prepared the same way as her (current) fiancé. So she's never found out how she herself likes them. Of course, the heroine finds out who she is by the end of the story, and there's a happy ending. It takes more work than that in real life, but there can definitely still be a happy ending for you.
How and when to start? Some lucky people seem to have been born knowing who they were and what they wanted. They move surely and unhesitatingly along a certain path in life, making all the choices they need to. Sometimes these are people who have always had an overmastering passion – they love animals or they are instinctive artists or they have always been able to make music or they have been environmental enthusiasts since they were very young. Knowing that core part of themselves from early on helps everything else around them to fall into place. So knowing what you like and what you're good at is a good place to start. Those two things aren't the same, by the way. You may be very good at data entry, for instance, but it bores you to tears. And you may love writing, but have to work very hard at it to achieve the effects you want. Try making a list of all the things you're good at. Make a separate list of all the things you like to do. Don't leave anything out, no matter how minor it might seem. All of this is what makes you yourself.
It's also a good idea to look at your own behaviour. How do you deal with conflict, emergencies, hectic situations, ongoing pressure, winning, losing? What makes you happy, sad, frightened, confused, excited, angry or agitated? What do you do when you're happy, sad or frightened, etc.? It's important to have an idea of your inner life, i.e. your emotional life. Do you have very intense emotions or do you take most things quite calmly? Do you always understand your emotions? Are you aware of how you feel and how your feelings change or do you only know you're angry after you've broken a window? This isn't a short or simple process. It's something that goes on all your life, finding out new things about yourself until the day you die. Some things aren't so easy to face. You'll invariably find that you have tendencies or behaviours which you don't like.
What's the advantage of all this? After all, lots of people live quite happily without any deep awareness of themselves. The advantage is the difference between living a life of chance and living a life of purpose. When you enter tertiary education, you are leaving a relatively sheltered existence and being exposed to many of the vagaries of the wider world for the first time. There will be immense variation in values, personalities, behaviours and agendas. It's a time of exploration and discovery and all this new knowledge and experience can pull you in several different directions at once. One day you're sitting with three friends who are all discussing contraception, wondering if you should be sexually active too, and the next you're attending a campus meeting of Abstinence International, and feeling profoundly grateful that you're not exposed to venereal disease. So remember, in order to keep grounded and make the best use of all the new information about yourself and everyone else, you need the foundation of at least a beginning awareness of who you are.