I come back from the dead to give some thoughts after about 5 hours of gameplay.
The first thing I decided to do was create a sim with the perfect student LTW and send him straight to university. Two terms with max credits for maximum difficulty, I chose to put him in the dorm that had the best kitchen. As expected, the other students living there were as messy as could be and would leave stacks of microwave meals in the dining room. I only made matters worse when I decided to put the deep fryer (sim store item) in the kitchen. Buy and build mode affects the entire dorm and not the room you claim.
A degree cannot be earned in one go. You need to send your sim to university a minimum of two times to earn enough credits to graduate. However, there's no cooldown moodlet like there is with traveling so you can send your sim right back to university when he's done with a term. I focused solely on the studying and largely ignored the social groups, choosing to buy my way to the top of each social group with lifetime happiness points. It takes about 12,000 to go from zero to top but if you just want the extra trait, you only need to pop 8,000 LTW. If you want to, you could even max all three but this is really unnecessary because instead of giving you another trait, it simply lets you repick the trait you earned.
When finals came, my sim managed to pass all of his exams with flying colors. I owe it all to the slot machine (sim store item) to earn money for upgrades and using the chemistry set to churn out sleeping elixirs. Because I had chosen technology as my major, boosting logic and handiness increased my GPA. The second time I sent my sim, I opted to rent out a one bedroom home and live by myself. This went much more smoothly because I also only had to attend two classes instead of three to get enough credits for graduation. Once I had finally graduated, which completed my lifetime wish, I was surprised to find that I was allowed to pick a second new trait. Now my university graduate sim had 7 traits.
So what did my experience give me? By uploading my max GPA resume, the military and the police were practically begging for me to join them, allowing him to start at career level 4. The police department were offering me $168 an hour while the military offered $235 an hour. For the police, this is more than double what a normal sim would make at that level and for the military, almost triple. My sim on the other hand, decided to go into the game designer career. It seems a little odd that one of the metrics for this career is nerd influence because you need a maxed out nerd level to even get this job to begin with. Another metric is "playing games" which I assume means your video gaming hidden skill.
After doing all that, I decided to activate a couple of cheats. The first thing I did was get my social networking to 10, which granted my sim the ability to, quite literally, change any sim's relationship to whatever he wants. Now you can instantly go from enemy to best friend without using alchemy. I also messed with the sim finder app. What this did was allow me to apply some filters (gender, age, traits, even astrological sign if you want), and it'll send a random sim who fits the filters to your home... or a specific sim if you apply super strict filters. He then proceeded to burn death after I had my sim dare him to divide by zero, which made him catch on fire.
The last thing I did before posting this was using testingcheatsenabled to give myself 50,000 lifetime happiness points to see if the honorary degree LTR is worth it. It does pretty much what it's advertised to do, gives you a degree of your choice while letting you skip university. However, the degree you receive will be a B and you'll only be able to start at level 3 instead of 4. Whether you want that A to start at level 4 or you want to skip it for a large fee, it's up to you.
So here's a quick summary.
-Four star ranking in a social group earns you a new trait.
-Graduating from university earns you another new trait, giving your sim up to 7 traits.
-If you reach 4 star ranking with another new group, you can repick the trait you earn from that. If you get another university degree, you can repick the trait you earn from that.
-Social networking at level 10 lets you instantly set yourself and any sim you want to best friend, or if you wanted, it doesn't have to be your sim. Want to make Nick Alto and Nancy Landgraab best friends? You can do that.
-Game Designer and Art Appraiser have branches. The sports one you get from jock doesn't.
-Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are rabbit hole days. Tuesdays have you use your exclusive item repeatedly in a set area (for me, it was the technology item at the comic book store) and Thursdays are an interactive lecture for two sim hours. Finals occur on a Friday, which is simply more rabbit holes.
EDIT: A few more additions
-Three new skills, all with challenges for supermaxing. Social Networking (3 challenges), Street Art (3 challenges), Science (2 challenges).
-The Cerebralizing Brain Enhancing Machine 2.0 is almost certainly going to be dynasty banned due to it being able to reselect traits to anyone who uses it, you can't reassign the social group and university traits with it though. It's a free Mid-life Crisis!
