Disclaimer: this article is based on personal opinion from past experiences. I know everyone’s experience is different. Disagree if you’d like.
I spent two years doing college wrong and a year after that slowly realizing what was wrong.
I don’t blame myself. I came to the US from China two years before starting my university. There, the goal of higher education is more or less to “get a good job”. My 11 years of education never taught me how to think. I spent most of my time doing whatever it takes to get the highest scores to prove that I was intelligent. With 1.4 billion people, you have to always be right, to stand out.
It took me six years of education in the US to finally learn how to think. I reignited what used to be natural when I was a kid: curiosity. When I last found it, it was barely alive. I still vividly remember my astonishment when my high school English teacher asked me for my opinion. I thought at that time she and the textbook were supposed to give me the right answers, and I would just remember them. Time flies. Now, one year away from graduating, I was frightened, wanting to stop time. Then I realized that time cannot be stopped; it can only be spent, and I wanted to spend it on things that matter. I will continue to be wrong, but I want to be less wrong this time around. Reflecting on my past three years, I have realized the many ways I was wasting my precious time on things that shouldn’t have mattered to me. You can argue that it’s a natural process in development to have made these mistakes, but I hope this article can speak to even a single person who can stop these mistakes sooner.
Mistake #1. I was in college to get a job.
I jumped into those investment-banking programs too early. I had an urge to prove myself, and an urge to secure a good job early on. Now when I look back, these all come from insecurity.
At those programs, people asked the bankers what classes they should take to get those jobs. I almost ended up taking them, and that would have been my greatest mistake. It pains me to see people spending four years of such hard-earned opportunity getting a job — just a first job. Being educated to get a job is like being trained to be a factory worker. We are really in college for an impact of a lifetime. We are here to respect knowledge and realize our ignorance. We are here to learn how to learn so when formal education ends, we can keep learning. Life is very long. With the development of modern medicine, I believe most of us could live to 120 years. Therefore, the goal of our education is to provide us for the next 100 years, not the immediate 2 years.
Mistake #2. I did things not because I liked them, but because my resumé liked them.
I am not saying that being strategic with opportunities is wrong. Rather, I see too many people, myself included, being too intentional with our choices. That means we are always living for the future but not embracing the now. We are too keen on making every single decision right, not realizing it’s the whole that matters, not every single choice. What Lucy Cheng ’16 said stuck with me when I asked her how to choose between two opportunities: “do what you want to do, not what you think you should do.”
Mistake #3. I took easy classes to get good grades.
This speaks the sadness of our system. It brainwashed us into believing that grades define how good we are. We are all victims of the system, but we have to decide whether we want to play within the rules or create our own rules. After failing my startup in my sophomore year, I realized what’s real: GPA is not, learning is. Having a 4.0 will not ensure that I succeed in life, but real learning will.
I am not saying we should demolish grades altogether. I understand what grades are for providing a measurement of excellence, and a source of motivation. But we need to figure out is if they are in fact useful to our personal learning, or simply bringing unnecessary stress. After three years, I have figured grades are utterly useless for me, because 1) I measure myself based on effort and improvement, rather than relative performances (against others), and 2) I am intrinsically motivated. Therefore, I should really stop giving a damn.
Some people might argue that not everyone is intrinsically motivated. Yet I would argue that our system made us so. Humans have made the progress we have made so far because we are curious and we want to understand how things work. If not for years of being conditioned to maximize our grades, all of us would be intrinsically motivated, just like young children. Please keep nourishing the young child inside of you no matter how old you are.
Looking at the history of education, grades are really invented to select factory workers. Because there is no need for distinct differences between them, an objective measurement is convenient. But it’s extremely hard to measure modern day workers using such simple criteria. Grades are in fact harmful because it makes us shortsighted. Because maximizing for grades becomes the goal, we would only do enough to get satisfying grades, rather than pushing further to actually understand. Furthermore, it makes us risk-averse because we want to be right and not to make mistakes. However, we don’t learn by being right, we learn by being wrong. To learn, we have to make mistakes, correct ourselves, and move on to making higher-level mistakes. Because grades punish us for making mistakes, we try to be right as much as possible, and as a result, forgo opportunities for learning.
In this GPA-driven world, we risk wasting our time by taking easy classes to bump up our GPA. One typical example is Wellesley students taking “Conversations” at MIT. It’s almost a Wellesley class because apparently, it’s an easy A to get (I hope I don’t piss too many people off here). The Wellesley Registrar’s Office even has a line that says “Conversations at MIT cannot be taken for credit more than once”. Every time when a friend tells me she is taking “Conversations”, it kills me inside. I have been killed multiple times. It really makes no sense to waste time on a class that doesn’t teach you much. Trust me, graduate school and jobs will sort itself out even with a 0.1 lower GPA.
Mistake #4. I took easy classes to prove my intelligence.
During my first year, I used to take subjects that I am already good at so I can prove my intelligence. This is the exact wrong attitude to learning. Learning requires an open mind. Nothing will be able to get in our mind if our mind isn’t open in the first place. We need to embrace the idea that 1) We are not so smart and that’s why we are here, and 2) our intelligence can grow. We can be smarter tomorrow if we work hard today.
I used to think my intelligence was fixed. It was something I was born with. Therefore, I needed to constantly prove to others I was smart. When things went well, I would feel smart, but when there were setbacks, I would conclude I wasn’t so smart after all, and feel defeated. When I demolished this fixed mindset and adopted the growth mindset, my whole world changed. I started seeing mistakes as opportunities to learn. I was much more accepting of my imperfections and stopped wanting to prove anything to anyone.
Besides realizing what I did wrong in college, I have also realized there were three key things I did right:
Win #1. Major in the hardest thing to learn on my own.
After running a startup in Mexico, I came back to school and immediately switched my major to computer science. It was because I failed so many times trying to learn on my own. If I were to do it again, I might even consider philosophy or physics because personally, they are the most challenging to self-study. When conversing with Wesley Watters, my astronomy professor who always managed to blow my mind, he also mentioned the reason why he chose astrophysics for his undergrad was that it was the hardest to self-study. He could study the rest by himself.
Win #2. I stopped taking classes that I could learn just by reading from a couple of books.
I recently got addicted to audiobooks. The more I read, the more I realized that the whole world of human knowledge lives in books. It’s impossible to learn the entirety of human knowledge during college, so our job in college is to gain enough foundation to keep learning for the rest of our lives. That’s why I started taking all sorts of introductory courses: philosophy, astronomy, politics, physics…
Win #3. I spent a lot of time away from school.
The two times I have been away from Wellesley contributed to some of my biggest growth. It was because when I was away, I was able to see things differently, which helps me refocus on the right things. The first time was working on my startup in Mexico. I gained a realistic view of who I am and stopped worshipping my elite college student status. I also gained a long-term perspective of where I want to get, not just in the two years immediately out of college. The result was, I ended up changing my major and also the entire trajectory. The second time was studying abroad at Oxford. I was fully challenged by having to read a novel and a couple of papers, write a paper, and having to converse one-on-one with a professor every single week. The way I used to learn — maximize for grades — didn’t work there. I had to fully understand before I could claim the grade. I was also surrounded by a group of friends who think so rigorously that they challenge me to the bones. I learned to respect both knowledge, and the rigorousness required to pursue knowledge, deeply.
Time flies. Four years will go by in the blink of an eye. While we can’t stop time, let’s make the most of it by focusing on the right things. Think about why we are here, think long term, and the answers will reveal themselves to you.
Read More -Chinese version (Printed with permission from Mojia Shen)