Me : Hello Dad! I’ve an exam today.

He : All the best son! I’m getting a strong feeling. You’ll rock it today. May god bless you!

Me : Thank you dad. Bye! And I hang up the call.

My friend standing beside me chuckles, “Do you do this before every exam?” I answer, “Yes, I feel good and encouraged, and so do they.” It hardly takes a minute to call up your parents, but it gives a lot of confidence and makes their day too.

Not calling up parents is indeed a common mistake college students make. For me the most common mistake is treating it like school. When I went to university, most of the people around me came straight from school. They had the thought like children who were being forced to do something. They skipped classes, sat at the back talking during lectures and even didn’t do the reading! They were still in “school” mode, thinking that the point was to get through it with the least effort.

For my part, I was there after working in a beer factory for three years. I knew that I had gone to university because I wanted to learn. I wasn’t there because my teachers at school made me go, or my parents made me go, or because my friends were all going. I had chosen to go. I think that this put me in a different mind. I read all the set texts and I went to all the lectures and seminars. Don’t get me wrong. I had fun too, but I was there to learn and I learnt a lot. I enjoyed it and it was rewarding to learn about the authors, their works, the critic's opinions etc.

The kids around me thought that reading six novels for a module and going to a lecture for each novel was too much work. They would read one novel, go to the lecture for that one and write their essay on that one book. They thought that they were really clever to work out an easier way of doing it. But they were tricking themselves out of an education!

There are other mistakes that may cause future regrets for the college students. A large number of them focus too hard on getting good grades, showing no interest in out-of-class side projects.   Some complain that they are too busy because of school. As a matter of fact, they do not seriously treat all the free resources that universities have to offer.

We’ve all experienced that feeling that comes when your phone makes a sound to tell you that its battery level is low. It often comes at the worst times – when you’re out on a trip and don’t have a charger, or when you’re expecting an important phone call.

Indeed, this feeling is so common that South Korean electronics manufacturer LG has given it a name: low battery anxiety.

According to a survey of 2,000 US adults conducted by the company last year, 90 percent of respondents said that they panic if their battery level reaches 20 percent or lower.

And last month, UK telecommunications service provider 02 found that around 15.5 million Britons live in “constant fear” of their mobile phones running out of power, according to a survey by the company.

“The problem is not about being unable to make calls, but is rooted in the fact that smartphones are now where we store digital memories,” noted the Daily Mail.

However, battery worries don’t just affect smartphone lovers. Many owners of electric vehicles also suffer from so-called “range anxiety”. This refers to the concern that the vehicle may not make it to its destination before the power runs out.

Meanwhile, it isn’t just low power that people worry about. A study carried out by South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University and China’s City University of Hong Kong found that many of us also worry about not having constant access to our phone.

This condition is known as nomophobia, short for “no mobile phone phobia（恐惧症）”. Symptoms include feeling uncomfortable when access to one’s phone isn’t possible, being unable to turn off your phone, and constantly topping up the battery to make sure it never dies.

So, why do so many people treat their smartphone with such importance? The underlying reason may be that they keep us connected to the people around us, and if we’re unable to use our phone, we feel like we’re cut off from our social life.

With products with bigger batteries being released all the time though - such as Xiaomi’s Mi Max smartphone range or Tesla’s Model S cars – battery anxiety may hopefully soon be a thing of the past.

Lia Thomas, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, is an excellent swimmer. She often beats her rivals by tens of seconds, breaking records. Her success is based on three things. One is natural talent. Another is relentless training. And the third is biology. For although she identifies as a woman, Ms Thomas was born male. Since humans cannot change their sex, she remains that way.

On the eve of her biggest competition, Ms Thomas finds herself at the centre of the bad-tempered debate about whether trans-women -- males who identify as women -- should compete in women’s sports. That, in turn, is part of a broader argument: should brute biological facts sometimes override people’s deeply held feelings about their identities?

This newspaper believes it is almost always unfair to allow transgender women to compete in women’s sports. The advantages of male are so big that no amount of training or talent can enable female athletes to overcome them. Florence Griffith Joyner’s 100-metre world record has stood for three decades. A male matching it would not even make it to the Olympics, let alone the final. In 2016, at an American event for high-schoolers, four of the eight boys in the 100-metre final ran faster.

Sports must therefore choose between inclusion and fairness; and they should choose fair play. That does not mean that trans-women would be barred from all sports. One way to make that clear would be to replace the “men’s” and “women’s” categories with “open” and “female” ones. The first would be open to all comers. The second would be restricted on the basis of biology.

Sport is public, and results can be measured objectively. That means the argument that the material facts of biology should sometimes outrank a person’s subjective sense of identity is easier to make. Some of these arguments will be twisted by those who wish trans-people ill. Such prejudice exists, which should be resisted, too. Most of the time, it costs little or nothing to respect people’s choices about how they wish to present themselves. In the rare cases where rights clash, society must weigh the trade-offs sensitively and with open eyes.