Having spent all of two weeks as a college graduate and invited to deliver my life story in three minutes for the USC Board of Trustees this morning, I figure now is a proper time for reflecting on my college undergraduate experience and, in particular, what I think I did right and where I screwed up. As an added bonus, I offer bold, unwarranted advice for students and educators.
What I Did Right
1. Not Selling Out Until I Found My Passion
I entered college without a clue of what I wanted to do with my life and entertained doing everything from making films to being a chef to being a sherpa. Instead of giving up on finding my passion, pursuing a career in medicine, law, or finance, and relegating my enjoyment of life to weekends and semiannual vacations, I spent my first couple of years at USC “shopping” for a passion by sampling from just about every program and opportunity USC had to offer. I explored international commerce in Hong Kong with the business school, tried to bring clean water to villages in Honduras and India with Engineers Without Borders and the USC Stevens’ Global Impact program, immersed myself in Chinese language and business through a summer internship in Shanghai via the USC Global Fellows program, led an initiative to bring the Flexcar car rental service to USC (now acquired by Zipcar), and backpacked western Europe. My major shifted officially from history to business to computer engineering to chemical engineering and unofficially to probably another dozen disciplines.
It was not until my third year at USC that I found something that stuck. That year, I took an introductory course in electricity and magnetism with Professor Paolo Zanardi that undoubtedly changed my life. Though I had taken physics classes in the past, it was Professor Zanardi’s style of teaching that introduced me to a new way of asking and answering questions about the world that resonated with my natural curiosities and loves of mathematics and problem-solving. I unashamedly abused his open office hours by drilling him with questions for hours on end multiple times per week and his ad-hoc whiteboard lessons and suggestions for further reading fueled late nights curled up in bed with a textbook, furiously solving problem after problem. In addition to being an excellent teacher, Professor Zanardi served as a living example to me that science was a viable and rewarding career path. Though I had fallen in love with mathematics in first grade, I had never known a scientist until college and had subsequently adopted the utterly false stereotype that scientists are no more than automatons who mindlessly carry out the “scientific method” at lab benches. It was meeting Professor Zanardi and other scientists that conveyed me to just how creative and exciting an endeavor science truly was. Professor Zanardi also offered me my first significant research experience the following summer in Italy, which made it clear – science was indeed the career for me.
After my decision to focus on science, life became, in many ways, far easier. I stopped worrying about classes or homework because I wanted to do the assignments anyways. I no longer felt an inclination to “build my resume” because the activities required to do so were exactly what I would have chosen to do in my free time. In summary, my internal motivations became aligned with external incentives and there was no longer any struggle to define what I should be doing – I just did.
An important caveat to this story – I was, in many ways, completely miserable during my first two years at USC. Devoid of any clear goals or direction, I felt foolish for not knowing exactly what I wanted to do. How could I not summon an answer to such an obvious question as: what is your passion? I spent hours and days writing and reflecting, trying to “discover” the answer by looking inward, and learned two important lessons. One, identifying your passion is not necessarily easy. Two, looking inward to “find yourself” is not necessarily an effective way to find your passion. Instead, I found that serial sampling of each of your latent interests and allowing yourself to get lost in each and every activity can be far more effective.1
Given my experience, I offer the following suggestions.2
Suggestions for students: your first goal in life should be to identify at least one thing you truly enjoy. (Note that you may, or even should, find multiple such things.) Then, and only then, might your goal shift to receiving a particular type of training or degree. If you find at least one such thing before college, great; pursue it. If you do not, use college to carry out massive parallel experiments in each of your possible interests. Actually, even if you come into college with clear goals, consider sampling from secondary interests anyways. In each case, lose yourself in these activities. While reflection is important, constant reflection can be a barrier to actually experiencing anything resembling passion, so reflect with caution. And have patience. Do not settle for a career in something you do not truly enjoy. Dabble widely until you find something you are truly passionate about. Ignore stereotypes about possible career paths and the pressure to chose something based on your parents’ preferences or potential for fat paychecks. When you pursue something you are really passionate about, happiness and success will come naturally.
Suggestions for educators: encourage students to spend time testing out their spectrum of unexplored interests. Offer and advertise optional programs that introduce students to other disciplines without forcing them to change majors. Most importantly, encourage academic advisors to ask students what they really enjoy doing and hope to accomplish, instead of merely focusing on helping them to fulfill degree requirements and resolve scheduling conflicts. Be careful in making decisions and defining goals for students; learning to make your own decisions and form your own goals is an essential part of life that should also be an integral part of education.
2. Finding Great Mentors
Mentors played an essential role both in helping me find my passion and in pursuing it. Paolo Zanardi stoked my interest in physics, fueled my self-study outside of the classroom, showed me that science was a viable career option, and gave me my first significant research opportunity. It is safe to say that I am a scientist because of him. Bartlett Mel taught me how to combine mathematics and biology to “see the neural forest for the trees” and intuit how brains do what they do, as well as how to effectively bridge the communication gap between theoretical and experimental neuroscientists. Andrew Childs taught me how to become a more independent researcher and gave me my first opportunities to give a research talk and write a journal publication. Gene Bickers and Stephan Haas introduced me to the quirky world of academia, answered long lines of physics questions, and helped me navigate many professional and personal problems. Kwabena Boahen and Ted Berger allowed a naive physicist-mathematician to charade as a biologist in their labs and, hopefully, absorb some knowledge about the brain.
Reading books and websites or attending classes is no substitute for working with a great mentor. Great mentors have followed a similar route to your own and can offer recommendations that take into account your strengths and weaknesses and anticipated obstacles on the road ahead. Finding appropriate mentors can be challenging and time-consuming because (1) they must possess knowledge relevant to your goals and (2) you must get along with them, but the trial & error necessary to find them is worth every bit of time and energy.
Suggestions to students: seek out multiple appropriate mentors. The great value of being on a college campus is not the ability to take classes (you can do that online); it is the interaction with people who are currently or have in the past pursued goals similar to your own and can offer relevant advice.
Suggestions to educators: establish programs that help professors learn and share best practices on mentoring. Additionally, establish formal programs for students across the university to help them identify and learn from appropriate mentors. Emphasize mentorship as an essential piece of undergraduate education.
3. Building the Communities I Wanted that Did Not Exist
While I spent my first semester of college reveling in the sheer number of different communities available to me, I soon realized that there were still a couple missing.
First, I wanted to live among a community of inquisitive, clean, and passionate people, so that my day would be infused with interesting conversations (and not marred by the overflowing sinkfuls of dirty dishes, typical of a college dwelling). Initial attempts, including my misguided joining of a fraternity, failed miserably. Eventually, I decided to build my own living environment. I found a 7-bedroom house and hand-picked friends and friends of friends to fill it. That was easily one of the best decisions I have ever made. The three years since have been chock-full o’ stimulating conversations3 and have convinced me of the benefits of communal living.
Second, I wanted to get off-campus, out of the city, and into nature more often. Despite USC’s prime position as a basecamp for hikes and camping trips exploring the geological chaos surrounding Los Angeles, I could not find a single student hiking group. So I started one. What began as a small group of friends organizing under the banner “USC Trekkers” soon ballooned into a 300-member Facebook group, and I have spent the past three years hiking just about every other weekend. Though I rarely use that Facebook group for organizing hikes these days, it seeded a now quite strong community of hikers at USC. I hike and camp now more often than ever with a revolving community of friends, and a fantastic official USC student group, SC Outfitters, has since spawned and gained popularity.
Suggestions to students: if you are searching for a community that does not exist, build it. It certainly takes effort to organize and develop a new community, but the results and experience are well worth the time and energy. If the communities you are searching for already do exist, great; join and improve them. However, due to the sheer volume of students organizations at a large university, it is easy to drift apathetically from organization to organization, feeling that each one is tolerable but “not for you” and finding yourself at graduation realizing that you did not experience college as you wanted to. Do not let this happen.
Suggestions to educators: make it easy for students to find the guidance and resources necessary to start new communities (USC does this quite well actually). In particular, offer avenues for students to easily organize living communities around mutual interests.4
4. Learning Outside the Classroom
As my family and friends know, I read textbooks like novels and have since high school. Doing so has helped me in several ways. One, it guided my selection of courses by indicating areas of interest or weakness. Without reading on my own, I would have been at the mercy of degree requirements and minimally informative course descriptions in allocating my time and energy at college. Two, it allowed me to get much more out of my classes, in part by knowing how to ask the right questions. I have found that learning requires at least two passes through a body of knowledge. During the first pass, one gains a sense for the general concepts and relationships between them but spends a great deal of time confused and unsure of what questions to ask to alleviate this confusion. During the second pass, one now has a sense of the general story and can focus on the details as well as asking the right questions to clarify confusion, recognizing the essential assumptions and tools necessary for the production of knowledge, and solidifying links between the important concepts.
Of course, textbooks are neither the only nor necessarily the most appropriate route to learning outside the classroom. In fact, I would argue that what I did outside of the classroom and beyond textbooks was most important to my education (textbooks and courses merely enabled me to do some of these things). For example, leading an initiative to bring Flexcar to USC taught me that proactively solving your own problems often helps others in the process, an 8-week internship in Shanghai developed my Chinese language skills far more than 3 semesters of coursework, working to bring clean water access to a village in India with students from engineering, international relations, and health promotions taught me the value of interdisciplinary teams, starting a weekend hiking group taught me how to organize and motivate people, helping to build an open-source web platform for scientific collaboration (CoLab) taught me how to monitor the zeitgeist of a community and channel it into a useful tool, and perhaps most importantly, doing research at and outside of USC conveyed to me the joy of scientific problem-solving and taught me how to pursue original research and communicate it to others. Looking back at my time in college, it is these non-coursework opportunities that I value most, not the classes. As I mentioned above when discussing mentors, the value of college is not the coursework; it is the professors, students, and opportunities that one gains access to.
Suggestions to students: do not restrict your learning to your coursework. Read outside of classes to inform how you choose courses and projects in the future. Preview course material so that you can ask the right questions and get the most out of your time with a professor. Perhaps most importantly, go beyond courses and textbooks; seek out opportunities and start projects to help you explore your interests and solve problems important to you.
Suggestions to educators: your primary goal should be to instill a curiosity and love of learning and problem-solving in your students. With that in place, they will carve their own paths. Also, de-emphasize the lecture. Encourage students to view video lectures or read textbooks outside of class and emphasize Q&As, discussion, and collaborative problem-solving in the classroom in order to maximize the value of student-professor interaction time. Integrate into courses projects that allow students to solve real-world problems of interest or importance to them. Offer plenty of non-major-specific, optional programs that allow highly motivated students to gain real-world experience solving problems of interest to them. Offer resources for students to easily propose and implement new projects and programs. Be flexible in allowing students to take less courses, forego homework assignments, or take a semester off to pursue such opportunities.
Where I Screwed Up
1. Teach
I have found that I do not truly understand something until I can (and do) teach it. When teaching, you are forced to understand every nuance of the relationships between concepts, the big picture as well as the fine details, and which assumptions are required for certain arguments and why, and you must be able to anticipate and answer every question that a naive but inquisitive student might ask. Combining this with my suggestion above that learning requires two passes, my educational mantra for achieving deep understanding has become: learn twice, teach once. Ideally, I would love to see teaching experience integrated tightly into education so that each generation of students is encouraged to teach and mentor the generation younger than them. For example, middle schoolers might help first graders learn to read, high schoolers might help middle schoolers learn algebra, college students might help high schools learn neuroscience, and so on. Beyond gaining additional familiarity with some body of knowledge, teaching also offers valuable experience in presentation, including how to combine an understanding of someone else’s background and the material to be presented into a coherent and satisfactory explanation.
Despite my love, appreciation, and proselytization of teaching, I failed to gain any consistent, formal teaching experience in college whatsoever. I did not mentor local high school students,5 tutor other college students in introductory material that I knew quite well, or even study or do homework in groups, which would have exposed me to spontaneous opportunities to teach. My rationale for foregoing the first two opportunities was that I did not have enough time to learn all the things I wanted to learn and do research and teach. My rationale for not studying in groups was that I did not want to water down my learning with socialization, piggyback on the problem-solving abilities of classmates, or devote the additional time required to organize such study sessions. In retrospect, I may have been mistaken in both of these choices. As I mentioned, teaching is an excellent opportunity for learning, as well as a rewarding experience in its own right. In the future, I will find ways to inject more teaching opportunities into my life.
Suggestions for students: teach! Teach to solidify your learning experience. Teach to learn to present. And teach because its fun and rewarding to witness and be responsible for the spark of understanding in the eye of another.
Suggestions for educators: integrate teaching experience into every level of education. Have middle schoolers teach primary schoolers, high schoolers teach middle schoolers, and college students teach high school students. Recognize that peer-to-peer teaching is not only valuable for conveying ideas to the taught student, but also for solidifying the understanding of the teaching student and for providing opportunities for spontaneous mentoring on additional academic and non-academic issues. Offering small, optional tutoring problems is not enough; make teaching required and easily accessible.
2. Have a Long-Term Project
I changed research groups in college more often than I changed running shoes (approximately 10 times to 3 times). I dabbled in groups working on everything from cognitive science and neuroscience to nanoengineering and neuromorphic engineering to quantum information and computational physics.6 In doing so, I gained an appreciation for the spectrum of how science is done as well as confidence that I have chosen the field that is most exciting and important to me. However, I also missed out on the opportunity to nurse a research project from vague proposal to implementation to publication. Most of my projects were done in collaboration with grad students or post-docs and focused on a sub-problem of someone else’s project. Only once did I feel that I truly owned a project and even then, the original project proposal was made by a professor (we collaboratively worked out the details).
In retrospect, my serial research sampling seems like a necessary part of converging on what I wanted to do with my time and energy in the future (I did not even consider science as a career until late in my sophomore year and had a bit of catching up to do). However, ideally I would have converged on a general topic before college, carefully chosen a research group based on advisor compatibility and research focus, and nursed my own project from vague proposal to publication throughout my undergraduate career.
Suggestions for students: to the extent possible, come into college with an idea of what you want to accomplish. Start a project or organization as early as possible to tackle a problem of interest and importance to you. Explore every aspect of that project and own it.
Suggestions for educators: encourage students at an early age (well before college) to begin considering what they enjoy doing and what is important to them. Emphasize reflection, independent decision-making, and goal-setting, so that students are more likely to enter college confident of what they want to accomplish. In college, emphasize these same themes in academic advisement and work with students to develop a set of goals that include an independent, long-term project of personal interest and importance.
In Summary…
…I found my passion, learned from great mentors, built the communities I wanted but did not yet exist, and did not restrict my learning to the classroom, but I also missed out on opportunities to teach and pursue a long-term project. All things considered, I have changed a lot over the last few years and while that is not sufficient for indicating progress, it is at least necessary.
Feel free to learn from my perceived successes and failures… or make your own mistakes. I confess the latter is probably more fun.
- David Brooks recently wrote a NY Times opinion article making a similar point. The (short) article is worth a read. ↩
- Everything I mention here generalizes beyond college life. Feel free to replace “students” with “young people” and “educators” with “parents.” College is certainly not an inevitable part of everyone’s life, nor should it be. ↩
- …and dirty dishes, to be fair. You win some, you lose some. ↩
- The Greek community is not the solution. (1) Fraternities and sororities, in general, are organized around binge drinking and mate selection, which do not span the full spectrum of possible human activities. (2) Fraternities and sororities are usually far larger than what I have in mind. I am suggesting an easy route for students to organize communities of 5-10 people who live in the same house and share communal space and mutual interests, be it hiking, writing computer games, or cooking. ↩
- During freshman year, I did mentor a local high school student with the USC student group, SCitizen, but only very briefly. ↩
- I did eventually find a group and advisor at USC that I would be quite happy spending another 6+ years working with. ↩
Related posts
College students/grads: feel free to add your own lessons in the comments.
Educators/parents: feel free to offer feedback on the suggestions I made.
College abstainers/dropouts: feel free to comment on whether and how you were able to accomplish similar things through alternative routes.
Nice piece, DJ. I want to jot down a few thoughts in support of and arguing against before I sit down to dinner. I’ll actually submit a comment for each one to structure the conversation.
First, I resonated most with your section about the importance of finding great mentors. This in particular is spot on:
My simplistic view of knowledge acquisition is that it’s about identifying and solving problems. Humans use tools to achieve this objective. Experienced tool manipulators have lessons learned they can pass along to those gaining experience. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
The university can be a great locale for having certain areas of mentors within your geographic vicinity. I suspect the hard sciences are primed for this largely because a lot of research still happens on campus. If scientists have a trade, it’s to do research, and studious young minds are offered real-world exposure.
As you allude to in your fourth section though, there are other professions in which off-campus is the best way to actually get a sense of what it’s like. In fact, the schools can be a decade behind. The classic story I like to tell is when I was in J-School, the professor taught InDesign in the front of class while I hid at the back of the class hacking on websites. Coincidentally, the web design segment of the course was canceled altogether.
What I’m most interested in on the topic of mentors are routes and paths. Much like GitHub has a commit history for code you commit, I want a tool to track my historical learning progress against different topics. Think of it as a much deeper way than resumes or CV’s to articulate what knowledge a person has. If you can capture this data, the applications are endless. Fellow students become mentors too, and you have a much better chance of finding exactly the right mentor quicker because you have more data to assess.
Second, creating far more space for students to teach is the single greatest opportunity for universities right now. I agree completely teaching is how you develop mastery. Jeff Atwood has a great related post about this.
Access to knowledge is no longer a university’s core asset. Google and the internet disrupted that a while ago, and Khan Academy is cleaning up. What they do still have is the ability to collect people around the symbiotic act of teaching and learning. It’s what they must capitalize on if they want to remain relevant.
Unfortunately, putting teaching responsibilities in the hands of students challenges what universities are optimized for. It takes the middle man, the arbiter of knowledge, the professor, out of the knowledge transfer equation unless you completely rethink their role.
Third, I find that your very first discovery, not selling out until you found your passion, directly contradicts your last discovery, having a long term project. I’d love to hear you explain how both can be true.
Lastly, to finally address your call for comment, there are things I’d consider successful in my learning path and things I’m struggling with.
In a uniquely internet way, podcasts keep my scope of awareness broad. One of the first I ever subscribed to was WNYC’s On The Media, way back in 2004/2005. This was so far back that I had to download new episodes at school, save them to a thumb drive, and transfer them to my iPod at home because we still had dialup. My intense study of the forces shaping the news industry through On The Media’s weekly episodes likely had a significant influence in my interests today. At the same time, I regularly listen to series like Seminars About Long-Term Thinking because they’re best in breed conversations about leading intellectual developments. On a related note, the latest Edge update was blowing my mind on the train home.
The majority of my learning in the past four years has been project-based, and I think this has had significant career advantages. It offers opportunities to develop skills, like leadership, negotiating with colleagues, and time management, outside of the core skills you need to actually do the project. My project-based learning has been possible because when I need to learn how to do something, I can just Google it. I don’t need to sit through a 10 week course where only 20% of the material is relevant to my interests or learning path.
With that in mind, however, there is knowledge I want to acquire that isn’t easily found with Google. The hive mind hasn’t fully booted. As such, I think there’s significant opportunity for startups like Skillshare or lightweight, more versatile continuing education programs like ours to fill the void.
For instance, all I know about server administration I’ve taught myself. I know a fair amount, but I’m also keenly aware that there are certain aspects I don’t know. I’m the prime candidate to take a 10 hour course for $250 to $400. The trouble is: I have no idea where this course exists. As far as I know, it doesn’t. Jacob Harris, a Senior Software Architect at The Times, commented last night that trial and error is the easiest way to learn.
Ultimately, I think that more and more our current schooling mechanisms are optimized for a bygone era. Yes, we still need a combination of knowledge, teaching and mentors for education, but the systems long to become far more versatile.
College: What I Did Right and Where I Screwed Up | Daniel Bachhuber's weblog // Jun 3, 2011 at 5:18 pm
[...] this dealCollege: What I Did Right and Where I Screwed Up Posted on June 3, 2011 by Daniel BachhuberCollege: What I Did Right and Where I Screwed Up. Great piece by DJ recounting his four years at USC. In an epic set of comments, I react to points [...]
I like the point about shopping around for what you are interested in, but I’d like to address the scenario in which your major shows its true colors halfway through. My first two year of chemical engineering were spent bulking up on lots of chemistry (which I loved) and basic engineering in addition to a great deal of wonderful TO classes (Thematic Option – an honors GE track for non-USC people). In my third year of chemical engineering, I started taking the real deal ChemE classes and found that I had been lulled into a terrible terrible mistake and it was a bit too late to go back and start the type of explorations that you mentioned without adding an extra 2-3 years to my undergraduate education, something that was simply not financially feasible. I think an important thing to remember that your major does not define you. I’m going to work for Cisco with a Chemical Engineering degree. This always turns some heads. I could have gotten a chemical engineering job, which would have made sense to some extent, but knew I didn’t like it and took an unconventional path. It may seem slightly alarming to go talk to a company who’s not recruiting your major, but getting hired is as much about interest, excitement, and ability to learn as anything else, and if you can demonstrate those things, you can turn your trajectory around and go down a completely different path than your major would typically take you.
sorry the point about TO was not clearly written. it is an honor GE track for USC people. I am informing non-USC people.
which brings up another basic school/life lesson always worth revisiting – always proofread before you submit something, whether a paper, an email, or a blog comment
Congrats DJ!
Great writeup. I second just about everything.
I agree about finding a passion, but I think too many people get discouraged when they cannot find something absolutely perfect. It’s more about finding something that you could enjoy doing every day for a good while.
Building communities seems like something that is only for certain people. Definitely encouraged, but not for everyone.
Teaching! I’m really glad you brought this up because being a GSI (what they call a TA at Berkeley… I don’t know why) for the past year has taught me so much. Especially teaching the Intro to Astronomy for non-majors, the material is very simple so it’s all about the pedagogy.
Having great mentors is what really sticks out for me. This is what made a huge difference for me and it’s clearly something you cannot get back home. I just started work with a new mentor up at LBNL and in one week, he has given me the motivation, science goals, connections, and resources that I never could have gotten any other way. Specialized guidance is crucial when there is such a tremendous experience gap between a student and senior researcher.
Thanks to everyone for their insightful comments! It is fantastic to return home from a camping trip with a pile of thoughtful responses. I will respond one at a time.
Re: Daniel 3:
Regarding routes and paths, we once discussed this before in the context of an “education browser” that I pitched to you and Shane.
The idea was to create a tool (in my mind, an extension for a web browser) that 1) performs an initial assessment of a user’s “educational state” (courses they have taken, articles they have read, and most generally concepts and skills they are fluent with as well as their preferred methods of learning), 2) surveys the user’s “educational goals” (what pool of knowledge they want to become familiar with, what problem they want to solve, what skill they want to acquire, etc.), 3) suggests “learning paths” that are (i) based on that user’s educational state, (ii) made up of freely available web content as well as pointers to books and articles that may not be, and (iii) informed by the learning paths of users with similar states and goals, 4) integrates with the user’s web browser, university course catalog, etc. to continually monitor and update the user’s educational state and paths, 5) suggests “side trips” for the user while in pursuit of their goals, such as interesting related topics or applications of an idea, and 6) requests plenty of feedback from the user on what resources/paths are and are not helpful.
Adoption of such a tool would help make education a science and leverage the experiences of “students” (I use that term very generally to include all people trying to learn how to solve a problem), an enormously useful yet underutilized body of knowledge.
The closest I have seen to such a tool are the monitoring/assessment tools that the Kahn Academy is developing, as discussed in this phenomenal TED talk by Salman Kahn.
Re: Daniel 4:
1) While the teaching ideas I mentioned above implied a hierarchy of older students teaching young students, peer-to-peer teaching is another underutilized opportunity that I actually mentioned in my presentation last week. As we have both mentioned, the greatest resource of a university is the community of brilliant people it builds. In my discussion of mentors, I only discussed the role of professors as a resource, but fellow students are just as much a part of the equation.
Here are two ideas I sent to some higher-ups at USC a few weeks ago, suggesting ways of leveraging student-to-student teaching at USC (though they of course generalize to other universities and environments):
Another important point that I mention here (and Atwood mentions in his post) is that requiring teaching can suck the enjoyment out of it. A challenge of any program encouraging peer-to-peer teaching is to create opportunities for such interactions without requiring them.
2) In response to:
One, I do not expect peer-to-peer teaching to replace professor-student teaching, but only to supplement it. Professors, as alluded to when I was discussing mentors, have a command of their field that gives them a broader view from which they can connect problems and methods in a way that many students cannot.
Two, I see the role of professor not as lecturer, but as mentor, discussion facilitator, and mediator of collaborative of problem-solving efforts. Lectures are useful, but universities do not need to locally (in both space and time) reproduce them. This is a waste of human resources. A professor who instead operates as a “just-in-time” suggestion engine for problem solving and related interesting ideas is, in my eyes, far more useful.
Re: Daniel 5:
I completely agree that my first and last discoveries contradict one another, and I tried to resolve this when I said:
Given my background entering college, I think I did the right thing in dabbling. The point I was trying to make with my last discovery is that, by entering college somewhat unprepared, my desire to identify my passion superseded my desire to nurse a long-term project. The mistakes I made regarding long-term projects were not made in college, but in the time preceding college.
Ultimately, I think nursing a long-term project becomes a primary goal only after identifying a passion (though the former can actually play an important role in the latter).
Re: Daniel 6:
While I do not think I could credit podcasts to have played nearly as integral a role in my education as the factors I mentioned in this post, I find them a very enjoyable way to keep up on ideas from all over the human spectrum and to keep myself entertained at the gym. (I will have to write a post in the near future pointing out some favorites, as Apple’s “Ping” network for sharing this kind of information seems to have failed miserably.)
Side comment: have you find a slick way to get Edge video/audio content on to an iPhone? Much to my frustration, Edge is absent from the iTunes store.
Regarding your Google-enabled project-based education, I should mention that this is not necessarily a viable route for all young explorers. Useful tutorials, Q&As, and other educational content is widely available for programming and web dev because the producers/consumers of such content are well-poised to create it; their skill set is directly aligned to leverage the web for learning and teaching! Unfortunately, the typical scientists (for example) is not nearly so web-savvy, and so alas, the university remains (in my opinion) the best route for the aspiring, baby scientist.
Re: Evan 8:
Excellent point, Evan.
1) One role of mentors is to give students an accurate idea of what jobs and skills they can expect at they end of a particular path, in this case a college major. Identifying mentors early can help avoid overinvestment of time in an inappropriate major. Unfortunately, students tend to meet the professors most well-poised for such mentoring only in their last two years of college, when they are taking upper division coursework, a time which (as you mentioned) can be a bit late for any drastic changes. The natural suggestion for universities then is to try to expose freshmen as much as possible to an accurate portrayal of the skill training and jobs available to them during and after their education. I believe this is the intended role of “freshmen seminars”, though having never taken one myself, I cannot comment on their effectiveness.
2) I completely agree that a major does not define a person and it should not be expected to. Students come in with very different backgrounds and goals and choose majors for very different reasons. Personally, I do not think learning and experimentation should begin or end with college, and I view your choice of an “unconventional” job simply as an informed decision based on your evolving interests and knowledge of yourself.
For the sake of any young students who might come across this post, I hope I did not imply that major choice defines a person. Majors are merely approximations of a path that might help a student pursue their interests and goals. It is the interests and goals that are primary, not the major.
Re: Casey 10:
I misleadingly framed my discussion of “finding your passion” as if it conformed to the Disney stereotype on finding your “true love,” as if there existed one and only one ideal significant other (or in this case, professional pursuit). I completely agree that 1) no activity will be “perfect” and 2) the real goal is a collection of activities that satisfy you in different ways. The way I think this pursuit works in practice is that we experiment with a ton of different activities in parallel, see what sticks, and slowly turn the dial from experimentation to exploitation over time. In other words, finding a collection of passions is best solved by simulated annealing.
Agreed! I tried to stress that building communities is only necessary if you really want something that does not exist. Building communities for the sake of building communities leads to soulless, transient organizations that are remembered only on resumes. For many (most?) people, joining a community and working to improve it will suffice.
how did you pay for your undergrad education? even instate tuition in california is prohibitive.
Fortunately, USC is a private school, so all students are equally gouged without regard for their state of origin and in-state/out-of-state was a non-issue. I summoned resources through a combination of scholarships and financial aid from USC, a senior year in high school spent pumping out essays for just about every private scholarship for which I was eligible, and a few student loans.
DJ! I thoroughly enjoyed that. In addition, you might want to update your “About” section. We are no longer Seniors!
As always, a throughly enjoyable read. I will pass this along to Forrest, who’s passion right now is being the best water polo player he can be and trying to figure out the right avenue to take to achieve that goal. Interestingly, we were having a discussion tonight (before reading your blog) about school, college and passions and he said “until I get the same feeling/thrill
about improving a test score from a 90% to a 97% as I get from improving my swim time by 6 seconds, I have no passions yet in class”.
He’s honest, to say the least.
Thanks Barb! My response to Forrest would be that I don’t think a desire to get good grades is the same as a passion for science, history, economics, engineering, math, or any other topic. Actually I know plenty of people who sought good grades all their life and then found themselves graduating college without a clue of what they really wanted to do in life. Although some people get lucky and have an excellent teacher or two who can infect them with a life-long passion, I do not think most schools are set up to be particularly inspiring places. As I tell my little sister, don’t rely on school to spoon-feed you your interests or passions. Those have to be found by reading and doing outside of the classroom.