What I learned at University

This post is my personal reflection on what I learned and the experiences I had over the entire course of the 3 year degree. I will not restrict it to only what I learned in class or because of the lecturers, but extend it to all the growth I experienced in this period. Please also understand that all of these observations are my experiences and might differ wildly from your own, but I think that even so there should be something that you can take away from it.

What you learn mostly depends on your attitude

This might seem like a strange though at first because at the end everyone passed the module, year or course did they not? Well yes, but have you noticed that there are just some things that you learned in a class that you just never forget but others are forgotten almost instantly. Now there are a miriad of things that contribute to this but all things being equal your attitude has a massive impact. This is the same effect that you experience when you take a subject given by your favorite teacher.

Expertise, Not a Good Teacher Make

Just because you know a lot about a certain subject does not make you qualified to teach that subject to novices, especially without training. In academia you are encouraged to focus on a very narrow field of study which allows you to push that field forward, but it means that essential skills from other diceplines are not taught or even acknowledged. I will discuss this in a later section but to be a great teacher you need to know how to teach first and understand the subject second. In fact if you don’t know the subject in depth, but continue to have a drive to learn yourself, you are setting a great example and you are able to relate to the misunderstandings of the students better. This understanding an determination to examine the subject from many angles really shines through and makes it a joy for students to learn from you.

Education is not a Guarantee of Quality

There is quite a few people that I study with that I would not like to work with, not because of personal reasons but just because I believe that are in the wrong field or under qualified. Because of the nature of evaluation and human nature most students can complete any course given enough time and dedication. Please understand that I am not faulting those people I just realized that the education is a test where every positive should also be verified because false positives are a very real possibility. The false negative is the other side of the coin that is often disregarded.

Most students don’t think

For all the talk about encouraging critical thinking in schools, I did not see many students that applied it. Sure they could reason in tests about certain fields that they were taught on but making inferences and connect across subjects or fields is too much of an ask.

Communication is Important!

Infact I would go so far as to say that the soft skills are as important as the technical or domain skills that we are taught. To properly expand on why I believe this is out of the scope of this post, But I will tell you what I mean by communication. Communication is not about where to put the address on a letter or how to address the recipient of an email. It is about transmitting ideas to one or more other parties, with clarity and understanding while optimizing for brevity. That is it, tell the other person what you think with as little time as possible while making sure that they understand what you mean.

To Think at Different Levels of Abstractions

To be able to “zoom” in and out in your mind as you think about systems and concepts at different levels of detail. This allows you to distill the requirements and important aspects of each of the layers and think about them without getting stuck in the details of the layer below or above. That is very abstract so let me give you a concrete example: When driving a car, it is of the utmost importance that one step on the correct pedals and pull the correct levers at the right time. This is a skill that requires a lot of practice at the start but then because second nature and you can concentrate on the traffic which is much more dynamic. This does not mean that the pedals are not import but you understand and use them well enough to invest in other areas. No consider that you want to become a racing driver, your goal has now shifted. You need to be able to preform the actions at the highest speed possible with the most precision. You have to go back and break down each of the things that you do and carefully examine them, practice it and get it perfect. You have to go back down through the layers of abstraction, shift gear, to see what tiny muscle movements you need to change to make it faster, or what little sounds you need to listen too to know the exact timings. But then again once you are in the race and you have practiced all these things you have to focus on the other drivers and what they are doing.

The point is that you need to understand when you need to be looking at what level of abstraction and what you need to optimize and think about at that level. They you can build a very complete idea of the system but it does not slow you down but helps you to understand how to make it better and how to make it work for you in the scenarios that you encounter now.

Thinking and working in a cross disciplinary way is essential

It is very easy to just think about a subject or problem you are working on in the domain that it “fits” in as that is the frame of mind you occupy by nature. One of the best tricks, and this is something that I picked up from the great Physicist Richard Feynman, is to try and take the problem out of this domain. Go find some other ways to look at it. Maybe you make it super simple and reason there about it for a bit. Maybe you try explain it to your little brother without using any of the jargon but really try to bring him along. The point of it is to place yourself outside of the comfort zone and actually draw on all the things that you have ever learned to actually solve the problem you have and not to just try solve the problem you thing you have with the tools that you are supposed to use. This is very easy to forget and not do when you are stuck on a problem because you think you are trying your best. You don’t even want to take a break because you really want to solve this. But that is exactly when you need to step back and take a fresh approach.

Tests are horrible metric

It is well known that people always optimize for the metrics that they are evaluated on, so choosing your primary metric is one of the most important decisions to be made. Given this test scoring is and the mark you achieve based on the performance is a really skewed metric that encourages very boxed thinking and looking for shortcut for lectures and not to find the shortcuts and truths in the material under study. That said I do think that tests do serve a good purpose in forcing students to revise and present learned material which has shown to improve long term retention and understand, so it is not all bad.