The Secrets to College Success - FULL COURSE

Have you ever looked around campus and thought, "Everyone else has their [music] life figured out, and I'm just faking it." Most students feel like that most of the time, especially at the beginning of [music] college. You get advice from others about the best majors or sometimes pressure from your family and friends to follow a certain path. I'm here [music] to tell you that you don't have to have it all figured out from day one. And you don't have to do exactly [music] the same things as everyone else does or check off the same set of accomplishments on an imaginary list to be successful in college and beyond. [music] In this module, we talk about making purposeful decisions in [music] college based on your interests and values. You are more likely to succeed [music] in college when you are engaged in classes and activities that inspire you and help you develop your [music] unique strengths and interests. You will hear from a passionate humanities major, [music] Nyx. I chose Nyx for this conversation because they are missiondriven. Their decisions in college are based on their values. You will even hear a story about why they chose to skip a class reading for something that was more important to them. Success in college isn't just about getting perfect grades. Success in college is about owning your education, using your agency, and finding your why for your college [music] experience. So Nyx, let's just start with a big question. Why did you decide to go to college? What purpose did you have in making that decision? >> So I think it started because I have a had a rough relationship with my parents and I really wanted college to be like um a tool of independence for myself to be able to go across the country, start a new life and sort of start over. Um I'm also first generation. So when that kind of desire faded, it was more so I want to go to college because my parents hadn't gone to college like that. Um my mom got her associates, but that was from a community college in Arizona. So I really wanted to get my university degree. So first of all, I did not apply to a lot of the scholar instate scholarships that most people um in my high school did because I knew that staying in state was not something that I wanted to do. if I had going to ASU might have been like a backup option for me, but because I didn't um the sticker price of like 30k a semester was definitely not going to be enough. Um uh was going to be way too much. I mean, and their scholarship was like 8K for merit, which is definitely not enough to cover 30. Um I was also choosing between some other schools, but their financial aid was not as good as Gails was. So, um once I got my financial aid package, it was kind of decided for me. Um, which is I think kind of a unique experience coming here because a lot of people are like, "Oh, I was choosing between this school and this school." And I'm like, "I am here because Yale told me they would pay for it." Um, and otherwise I might have considered not going to college. So, >> so Nyx, how did the purpose you had for going to college affect how you went on to engage in your courses, especially in your first few years? So, I already saw being in college as like this huge achievement and it kind of changed the way that I saw achievement for myself because I was able to take more risks, try things that I hadn't tried before and like the ability to fail was suddenly presented to me, especially at an institution that has a lot of ways to get out of failing. Um, we have things called deans extensions that give us extra time on things even when our professors don't want to give us extra time on things. um and I have the opportunity to try new things and completely fail, which I really appreciate. >> For a lot of students throughout the um process of applying to school, they're getting a lot of advice um on, okay, you have to do this in order to get into the college that is the best fit for you. And it can feel like the route into college is meeting everybody else's expectations. Yeah. >> And it's it's so interesting to me um even at a place where students are very well resourced and coming in many students have had a lot of attention paid to them. So many students have never had an adult sit down with them and ask them why do you want to come to college? And sometimes that that space is given in orientation or sometimes that space is given in talking to an advisor or a faculty member or a a you know a peer advisor um like a residential assistant or a fro you know what we call our first year counselors but even then in that first few weeks it's really busy people get really overwhelmed. Um, and to explicitly tell yourself, sit back and reflect on what you've learned in those first few weeks and to say, "Okay, why am I here?" It's so powerful because then it can really um help calm a lot of the noise, right? >> Often the first answer I get to that question when I'm doing advising and say, "Okay, so why why are you here? What is it that you want to get out of this?" often the first answer is something related to major or career, right? I um have always wanted to be a doctor. I um I'm really interested in in C in computer science. I really like writing and I want to be a writer, which are all good answers. They are all really really good answers. I think the the the key shift that I'm hoping students will make as they enter college is to think about those career focused goals and those major focused goals, not as a straight line. So, if someone comes in to an adviser and says, I want to I want to be a writer. Um it's really um I think the the lowest level of support that that adviserss can give is to say okay so let's look at um courses in writing and let's look a little bit if there's a journalism major or a journalism program on campus like here's here's how you go. But I think the um the rather than thinking about okay like how do I actually get this get the goal to this nebulous idea of I'm going to be a writer. My second question to someone like that is what do you like writing about? >> Yeah, it's a really critical question. One of the things that I know as as a teacher of first year writing is that my students are way more engaged in the writing if they are writing about content they care about. Right? Which is why at at our university we have you know 30 first year writing courses and all of them have different topics so that the person can find the thing that's most interesting in to them and they can be engaged in. Um and then the other thing is if you ha if you are interested in a career um there again like there's not just one kind of writer there's not just one kind of doctor there's not just one kind of engineer right um and we need in our very diverse and exciting world we need all kinds of those you know like like all those sub fields right and it's not something that you're doing passively or it's not something that's being done to you you're actively going out choosing the courses that are going to help prepare you for whatever comes next that is in your interests, right? >> And that's how you get more engaged students. >> I think something I'm thinking about as well is like extracurriculars and how they play into interest, especially when it comes to writing. I know on campus there are a lot of different writing organizations that you can join, some with different levels of prestige than others. the Yale Daily News, which is our like our main college newsletter. Um, but I also know it's environment compared to some of the other writing um places on campus. And so, how might what kind of writer you want to be be a good question. >> Yeah. And also to see what's in your wheelhouse like sort of like, you know, cuz because maybe maybe you've always seen yourself as a writer, but then you take on the role of an editor and you're like, "Oh, wow. I'm actually really good at this. Maybe I this is maybe this is the direction I want to go." or maybe like you take on that role and it's like, "Oh, I can't stand it." Um, but I've learned some things about writing from having to see other people's writing and how to shape that that I'm going to take back and use when I become a journalist or I become, you know, or maybe I can't stand journalism and I want to write fiction or podcasts or, you know, [laughter] whatever else is out there. I've been struck by how often it's about personal fulfillment and not about I mean like you are thinking ahead about getting a job and what skills are going to provide you with that job but but it seems that that flows out of the personal fulfillment first. >> Yeah. I think when I wanted to go to college originally I was really thinking about what is my degree going to do for me but and like where is it going to like what doors is going to help me open. Um but I think now what I understand is that this is a stepping stone to having an infinite number of doors open especially like given the institutional backing that I have. I know I can be secure and you know trying things and failing at them. Um like I just know that I can be able to do anything that I want pretty much after I have this degree. I if I wanted I've been interested in film lately. If I wanted to go to film school after this I could that's an option for me. If I still want to go to law school that's still an option for me. Um, and financially those are complicated questions, complicated discussions. Um, but it's a I since I get to do this part for free, I'm really focused on finding it is out what it is that makes me the most happy so I can make better in like literal investments later on. One of the big changes that I see in students and the ch and it's it's really a a form of of gaining maturity and gaining confidence that um you are a capable person and um there is value to you in your interests and in the skills that you have chosen to develop. As long as you do that sort of purposefully and with reflection and um you know and and taking some some risks sometimes, right, to stretch yourself um and that that ends up paying off more in the long run than sort of checking off all the boxes. >> No, 100%. I think being passionate about something and working on it is going to be a lot more fulfilling. Not only personally, but like career-wise because when you care about something, you put your energy into it and when you don't care about things, you don't. And it's hard to be successful when you're not putting your energy into things. When I get to train my wonderful mentors like like you, I think sometimes in that training people are surprised that one of the first things we talk about are values and how um helping students maintain their values um or you know expand and and deepen those values over the time that they're at at college and then be able to to sort of you know um continue in that vein after they leave. Um, like I'm going to turn that back to you. Like why do you think thinking about your purpose and thinking about values at the same time is meaningful? >> I mean, I think I had a firsthand example about why it was so important. um my freshman sweetmate um has always been really passionate about a certain list of things and was like given the opportunity last year to have a summer internship doing one of those things. Um and it and it was like a really insane opportunity that freshman year him would have been so overjoyed about like would would have immediately accepted would not have been able to stop talking about it. But instead sophomore year him was like was considering not doing it in favor of an internship that would be that would have more structure um that would be less work um because he would be working with a community that has less resources um in on an international scale. So he would be doing a lot of work and it would be like really intensive and also really like close like close to home. Um and I talked I talked to him after he said he was like maybe not going to do it. And I was like what are you doing? I know you like you want to do this. I don't know what version of you this is right now but this is not who you are. I know you want to do this internship. And he ended up doing it and ended up thanking me because it changed his life. And also it it's an insane accolade on his like his resume as well. I don't know why he didn't immediately want to do it. Um, and so if you're not intentional about your values and how they develop in college and thinking about it, thinking about the people around you and and how their goals are going to influence your values, whether or not you're surrounded by people that want to make money and only care about making money or they only care about the next prestigious college they want to go to after this one, which is an insane goal to have, I think. Um, if you're surround people like that, it's going to be a lot more difficult for you to not only preserve your values, but deepen them. Um, I think my values since coming to college have deepened in a lot of ways, grown more complex and um, and more so than when I started versus some other people I know. It's been the opposite. And so I think it's like a very intentional it needs to be very intentional practice of doing things that are going that you know are going to be good for you and the values that you hold instead of being okay with you know like foregoing your values for some other reason. >> Yeah. And that's sometimes like the the reason why I appreciate the students who ask who answer my question like in in the form of the last category which is I've always wondered about X. I've always had this question about this. I've always had this drive to do X right because it because that's those are the students who are already in some ways ahead of the game. >> Yeah. I am so happy that he was able to like do that and he's also been an inspiration for me in terms of I always wanted to go back to my community. It's something I still um and in Phoenix it's something I really want to do but my parents are both moving and so plans change your who your community is changes. Um, my dad's from the south, so that's now a new direction I'm considering is maybe reconnecting with the other side of the family I didn't have. And so really still being there for my community, but that's a different definition um and different understanding what that means. So your values can and should also change. It's not like, oh, I should be doing things that a freshman would have done. Um, but also those can be really good indicators for what you actually deep down care about. >> So next, yes. How do your current goals sort of like affect the decisions that you're making right now? Because you're kind of like in the middle of it. You've talked about that process of, you know, making some purposeful choices in the beginning even though it sort of seemed like you were trying out a lot of different things. To do that deliberately was just really helped you find the place that you're supposed to be. Um, and so now like what are some of those goals that are shaping you? Yeah. Um, so I am the president of a nonprofit organization right now known as Y New Haven. Um, which where we work with youth ages 18 to 24 our age, college age, who are experiencing homelessness, some of which are actually other college students. Um, and navigating how to prioritize that over I had a reading the other night about um, the history of rec recreational mathematics in Germany and France. And so prioritizing whether or not I do work for my nonprofit or I do that reading seems a little bit clear to me based off of what I want to do with my life. I think um balancing homework and extracurricular is really all and your personal life all depends on what your priorities are. And for me my degree is so I can do something for my communities after I graduate. Like perfection isn't the goal. It's just a matter of focusing your energies where you think it matters most and where it will do the most good either for yourself or other people. Yeah, I want to take a little deeper dive into that, right? Because I think some of the students who might be watching this are like, "Wow, they run their own nonprofit." >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So, yeah. So, the nonprofit in question has existed for a really long time. I'm just the president of it right now. Um, it has ex it started in Harvard Square where they opened up where students opened up the first ever studentr run homeless shelter in the country and that sort of energy spread to Yale because and Yale organization was like, "Oh, Harvard's doing that. We really want to be the next ones to be doing that. >> What about, you know, taking some time to reflect about what you want to do with your time at Yale led you to push yourself a little bit to take that leadership role, right? Because it because I think the way that a lot of of students coming in, they think of success in college as getting good grades, >> right? >> Um, and so you've made this decision. You're like, I'm still going to get good grades. you're still going to try, but there are these other experiences that you can get at college that are equally important. >> And when I say I'm going to miss a discussion post is because I'm like or I'm okay with getting A's and B's at Yale. That's okay with me. I that's not going to end the world for me. Um, but how this all started, I joined this organization as a volunteer my freshman year. I was a really slow volunteer in terms of the onboarding. Um, but I become kind of close with the current president at the time who's now our student coordinator. Um she's going to medical school right now and working as a our part-time coordinator for Y network which is really awesome. Um and so she was kind of like I think it could be a good fit for for the for the role of president next year which was um pretty fortunate conversation because we needed to like pull people from Dwight Hall which is the largest service organization on campus to actually get more board members. We were struggling to even fill the board positions. So it was really a matter of necessity. I saw that like this organization was going to fall apart and I really like the mission that it had and I appreciated its history and I wanted to keep it going. Um, it's not something I exactly expected to happen, but it's not something that is might affect what I do after college because I know the ex-president was able to work for them after graduation. I know that is an opportunity that will be available to me if I want it and they're opening a new facility next year and like they're doubling the number of beds for youth um experiencing homelessness in New Haven next year and there's and I was like I maybe I want to be there for that. Um so it's completely changed my whole life actually. >> Yeah. And I I I love how you described it as some as starting with something that you're interested in that unfolded slowly, but then through talking with other people, you realize that there was an opportunity and that from there that's led to other opportunities that you might be able to have in the future. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. And I think the the the core of that is that you had a kind of purpose of I want to volunteer, >> right? you know, and you didn't know necessarily. I mean, maybe you had prior interest in this or it's something that you that that connected with you in some way and then that you wanted to to follow through on. >> I I am from an FGLI background, so the like I've always been proximate to people experiencing homelessness. It's always been something that could be on my radar. I've had friends where my other friends were their last option or we were their last option. And so, it was always close to my heart in that way. and I knew that I wanted to be a part of an organization that would be doing some good. Um, >> and I think that's also something that, um, students underestimate when they first get on campus is how much agency and and responsibility they really can take on in these four years, right? Um, from the time you're, you know, you come in, especially if you're a traditional age student, um, or even as a transfer student, right? like you can come in um see what the landscape is, find the thing that that you feel like you can put your talents and your experience to and then see it grow. >> Yeah. I think a lot of people around me like make the mistake of being involved in too many things with too little amount of commitment to the point where they end up doing damage to the organizations that they're a part of because they're not doing anything and giving it their all. Um, I've I've had that problem with like working with people that were my friends for my nonprofit and seeing them seeing what they prioritize and versus what they don't prioritize. Um, so don't be careful about spreading yourself too thin and really focus on the things that you're passionate about and finding those. It's good to experiment with a lot of different things when you don't know what what it is you're looking for. Um, but once you do, it's I think it's better to hone in um and really focus that way you can get the most out of it. you're describing an experiential learning experience, right? Where um you know it's not part of the curriculum, but you are learning a ton of stuff in terms of like how to manage people, how to plan, how to budget, um all skills that are going to be helpful to you in whatever you do after Yale. And I think that it's really important to see what you said is like once you find your thing, lean into it like the completely getting back to that question of like sort of what are some other purposes again some of them can be um familial right like I'm coming to college because um you know I really want to be able to make sure I have a professional job so that I can support my my parents who don't have any resources or um you know some of my purposefulness is shaped by what's, you know, what's happened in my community and I want to make sure that I'm, you know, being able to prepare myself to go back to that community. Also, people are like, I'm going to college because I want to find a career where I'm going to make a lot of money. And that is totally a legit thing [laughter] to to say. Um, and that, you know, again, I would want to add in, but can you make money in a way that still feels good to you, you know, and gives you purpose and and helps you, you know, give back and things like that. Um, but you know, for some people like that that they there's there's a there's a way of living, there's a lifestyle that they want to have. And for some people that lifestyle needs you need to have a lucrative career to to have that lifestyle, right? I I once had an alum that I was talking to who said, you know, um they went into um to to try to have a career where they would be working on Wall Street and and in finance in part so they could make a lot of money so that they could turn around and donate to other organizations and help people the way that they had been helped by nonprofits in the past. Okay? you know, and at the same time be able to to have a nice life and take vacations and, you know, um be able to to have a good work life balance >> 100%. >> I think there is such an infinite like number of opportunities that are both lucrative and you can also help people. Um, like there I I know people that really want to get into big law. And they are like, "But I also don't want to be getting into big law. That's going to be hurting people." And I'm like, "There are so many humongous firms that are doing important cases in the nonprofit world and the civil rights world that are doing good things that make a lot of money, but are not, you know, you don't have necessarily have to quote unquote sell your soul in order to do it." a phenomenon I see with a lot of my first and second year students. These and these are often students who have worked really hard to um get into college and their entire community and their entire family is is just 100% behind them and they've been telling that that community and that family, yeah, I'm going to go off and I'm going to be the, you know, next like, you know, tech wonder. I'm going to study computer science and like this is for me. and then they get to college and they take their first CS class and you know even and even if they've had experience with with computer science before that first college CS class is always like a doozy. Um and then they realize like you know what my personality is not somebody who wants to um spend like 40 hours a week coding in isolation. And for some students, they feel s like they feel like they're letting people down if they make choices. And I just want to directly reassure them. You're not letting anyone down. [laughter] Like you are entitled to um find something else that makes you happy. And even if we have adult returning students who are 25 to 30 or 30 to 35 or beyond, the experience of being in college is going to change you, right? That's when you can lean on the structures of the university. I mean, we actually even at and in in our office of educational opportunity, we have a workshop where we um I I don't know if you've ever run this workshop, but it's about um how to tell your p your parents that you're going to be an arts and humanities major. [laughter] [gasps] >> That's so funny. I think I need to teach that. I'm still going to law school after graduation, so that part saves me. That part saves me every time. But >> yeah. >> Yeah. But but at the same time like for a lot of families that's like a real conversation because again it's hard it's hard for you know it's hard for other people that you feel an obligation to or that you feel connected to and yet you're having this experience that is different than theirs and it's your experience. And I guess the things that I would suggest are um to really trust your gut. you know, don't force yourself to do something that makes you miserable just because you've told other people that that was what your plan was. It is totally okay to change your mind and to find something new. And you know, and that's in, you know, um 70% of the students coming into Yale changed their majors from what they said they were going to to major in. 70%. I mean, I sometimes have students that they switch their majors in the fall of their junior year and they're still fine. They still graduate on time, whatever that means, right? I mean, and and for most universities, on time means within six years, right? That's that's the metric that we use. Um but um you know, however long it takes, it takes, right? Um, and you know, as long as you can sustain yourself and you feel like you have the resources to sustain yourself, maybe you're changing your major and you realize you have to do an extra semester, right? Go talk to financial aid. See what that means for your financial aid. Go talk to, you know, the director of the program. You know, maybe there are scholarships that the university has for that particular major. You never know. talking to as many people as possible about what your plan need to do and getting their support, it it could be a game changer. So, we've been talking for the last few minutes about how students can find their purposes. And so, we actually have um put into the module a worksheet that people can do at home um to try to figure out those purposes. And this is something that you can use um multiple times throughout your career um in college. It might be best to use it once before you start just so that you walk into um your orientation or your course selection with some ideas about how you might be able to do some course selection that matches your purposes as well as thinking about the kinds of extracurricular activities you might want to join or the kinds of campus jobs you might want to try to find. This is really just for you. You may find it's useful to um you know bring it to an advising meeting if you've discovered something through this process of of writing about about it and reflecting about it. But consider this as just like a private document that's just for you, but that it's a process that of reflection that can really help you um from semester to semester. So the first question is just what are some topics you're interested in in learning more about in college and the second question I think is really important which is why are you interested in those topics and um and that's important because that speaks to that motivation that we were talking about. >> Yeah. I think the first way I would approach this is by um making a sort of chart or like a list of different things that I'm interested in. Um, I know for college applications often times you're asked to look into the majors of different universities. So, you probably already have some sort of idea about like what it is your um university or college has to offer, but if not, like again, like the course list can be a really great place to start. Um, I know like course table, which is where we have our courses. Um, I literally I think as a freshman read through almost every single course that was being offered. And so maybe this is a space to write down, okay, that class sounds really interesting. It doesn't have to be this humongous broad topic of economics that might not be interesting as a whole, but maybe there's one part of it that is that you could explore in a certain way. So yeah. >> Yeah. And I really want to emphasize those last two questions, what you were just saying, like what do you like about doing those areas? And as as you were talking about, maybe you have a curiosity about engineering, but do you want to actually do the engineering? Like the the example for me is really like I really love this is something my husband and I share is we really love watching like those TV shows about like the planets and the stars and all that stuff. But do I want to do theor, you know, like astrophysics? >> Physics? [laughter] No. >> No. >> Um, >> but you can take an astrophysics class. I've taken an astrophysics class, introduction to relativity, >> really awesome because it's intle made for non- STEM majors which is like perfect. So there are options you can take those classes and they and they do count for credit that did not. >> So astrophysics would be my my fun course. Yes, exactly. >> In my first year. Yeah. Um and then again this this question of meaning like why are these topics meaningful to you? Right. um for for me like taking that astrophysics class like that would just be fun and and it's meaningful to me because I'm just I'm really fascinated by like how incredibly complex our universe is and it's just a curiosity for me. The second question is really um helpful, right? Um and I actually really love these questions because you can also use them as like party questions. Yeah. >> To use when you're at a party. Yeah. Ice breakers. Exactly. I've really found this first question. When you have spare time to read um and I probably should have put internet first, but um books, magazines, internet, what do you enjoy reading and learning about? And what's what's fascinating is when I ask students this question during an advising meeting, um they will come up with something like fashion or I really like tech and robotics. Um then I'll turn to the course table or Yale course search and I say okay well go ahead put fashion in there and they are shocked when like three or four fashion related courses right like like where that comes up as a keyword. There are so many classes I feel so overwhelmed with what I could do. This is a really great way of helping to identify a few things that maybe you can explore um and help start to narrow things down. If you were to have an ideal job, what would you like to spend most of your time doing in that job? And that's a little bit of a harder thing to kind of wrap yourself around, but like actually like how do you want to spend the time of your day? >> Yeah. I would almost like encourage you to return back to that list from the first question that you made about like the different things that you're interested in and really think them through to like the job world. Okay. Again, I was like talking about wanting to be, you know, being interested in building things and engineering. Um, but the idea of being an engineer, like the sitting at the desk and engineering theoretically, but not actually building anything sounds horrible to me. Um, and so I think that really going through the list and thinking it through that way would really help. Also, maybe you're the kind of person that needs to do a lot of different kinds of things. Like I was looking at that list and I was like, I love talking to people. I love creating. I love doing research. I love being on my own. I love problem solving. I love writing. I'm like, I don't know how to choose based off all of that, but I want to be a public defender. And that pretty much fits into all of the different categories. You're talking to people, you're creating things, you're writing, you're doing research on your own, you're doing research in a team. So there are really a lot of different you you can have jobs that do a million different things or you can have jobs that do one some very very specific. So also think about that what kind of breadth of activity you want to have. >> So that's for that first those questions were for people who like maybe you're trying to narrow down your interests. Sometimes I have students come in and are like they already have their four-year plan down to every class they're going to be taking for all four years. >> Yep. >> I've met them. >> Yeah. [laughter] >> It's really horrifying. >> And you know, you as a you're a junior, right? And I as someone with lots of experience were laughing because >> it does not work out that way. [laughter] like you take one class that well one you may not get into one of the classes you thought you were going to get into for a semester especially for like core classes or like a seminar that might be higher level that you were like I could just get into that because you know I just think I can't I don't know why you would but you know maybe you have that sort of mentality it can it's not exactly going to work out the way that you think it will >> it never will work out the way that you think you will um and that's a good thing like that's the other thing and so again college is one of those places where you get exposed exposed to new things and you can take risks and try new things. So this this next set of questions is if you're the if you're that type of person who's like, "Yeah, I'm going to be in this major. I'm going to take my prerequisites and I'm going to try to get some of my distributional requirements out of the way. I got to take a writing class. I got to take a language class." Um, always save one class per semester, especially in your first year, to take something that is completely new to you. And so like these are questions that will help you do some of that exploration. So I get a lot of great um responses when I ask my students, is there something you've always wanted to learn, but you never had the opportunity to learn? Um and again, someone will give me their response, we'll type it into the course search, and lo and behold, there's a course that they that's like perfect to help explore that kind of thing. Um this um this this is this next question. If you could do two careers at the same time, like being a brain surgeon and a rock star, like what would that other career be? Right? Because you know, we're complex human beings. We don't just want to do one thing. We want to try a variety of things. And if your if your um college offers a minor or offers certificate programs, maybe you want to have that certificate program, you know, like that could be a way of satisfying it. So, you know, so for example, we have um many many certificate programs like say, you know, um there's one in um global health that like I would have been fascinated by even though I'm a humanities major. That would have been a really interesting certificate for me to take. >> Yeah, >> they also have all the language ones as well. >> So, um you can really think about that in like other ways as in other ways as well. Like if I could like learn any language that I want like in the entire world, what would I what would I want to learn? and see if your college has it offered because you'd be surprised even if it's not like a main course. Um there are a lot of creative ways to take languages that are not offered at your institution v via partner institutions which is something that one of my um sweetmates freshman year did um they learned their native language Bengali um through a partner program with I think Cornell um which is also a possibility. So, if there's like something that you've always wanted to do or learn, um, even if it's skill based, you definitely can. And if it's skill-based and like, uh, I've always wanted to learn how to turn my computer on and off. Um, so before an IT guy tells you to do that, you can think about like what do I what would I want to do in addition to my studies and think about how you can explore things outside of um, your studies. I know for me, I really wanted to do a career that was not or at least like a college career. I've been doing this for like three years, so it feels like my career at this point. um but have a job that where I could turn my brain off and that's something that was really important to me. I wanted to I wanted to have a job where I did not have to use my brain anymore. And so um I think I've reached the point where that's no longer the case unfortunately. But um it used to just be moving machines all the time and that was really nice because I could give my brain a break. So also think about that as well. What other activities um could fill in the gaps? >> Yeah. And then finally, again, this is kind of to urge students to a little bit more experimentation towards a little bit more risk takingaking. Um, a lot I found over the years that a lot of students have the thing that they tell like their family and their their high school teachers and their high school friends like, "Okay, I'm going to major in X, but then secretly there's something else you kind of want to explore." Um, and >> what would that secret thing be for you? Right. and and like and doing just even just a little exploration doesn't mean you have to do it but just like to be able to enable you to explore it. I think that's a really great question too. >> 100%. I know for me, I really wanted to be a writer for a long period of my life. And so now that I'm humanities major, wanting to go to law school, I have a lot of opportunities in my undergraduate to write and to have works that I can use as like um like a like a starting point for when I graduate that'll help maybe propel like a secondary career in writing. Um and also like pick classes that give you the opportunity to do that. Like as a humanities major, I have class I pick I tend to pick classes where the final project is something creative where I can do whatever I want because that gives me the ability to actually explore the things I'm interested in regardless of what anyone else thinks. Um which is a really amazing opportunity. >> Yeah. And so the last two questions are really to help you think forward. So you've done all of this in the first three questions. You've done all this exploration of possibilities, right? to to set you into different directions, whether that's having a lot of ideas and narrowing that down or having a very narrow idea and then trying to expand it. Um, but just ask yourself, okay, like I like review what you've written and then ask yourself, what are some things that you would like more information about? So maybe, you know, like let's take that example of like the the brain surgeon rockstar, like what would that other career be? and and you do some internet searching and you find oh there's >> um you know there's a there is a certificate program or there is a minor in this area who would you go talk to about that right um and you might start with just like one person especially if you're in your first few weeks of class often that person might either be your first year adviser or it might be a peer adviser so because so many colleges now have peer counselors um and and resident assistants and things like that that can help answer some of those questions. So, just go to someone and ask them and they can help you start to explore that new thing that you're interested in. >> Yeah, I remember when I was a freshman, there were a lot of events where they had like the doses or people working in the different departments all meet in one area. There's a million different tables and you can kind of get like a tasting or a sampling of what all these different departments have to offer. Um and then the the last thing is um and again it's a similar kind of question but are there any particular challenges or or you are anticipating or worried about so say you are really interested in a topic or in a class that involves a lot of writing but you know you just wrote lots of in-class essays. You've never written like a really long research class paper before and the and the class you're interested in they do they do a research paper. what are the resources that are out there to help you? You know, one example is most universities now have writing centers where you can go and get help um with your paper in in whatever form it's in. Um but like to be able to ask again that that array of advisors and supporters and peers who may have knowledge of the resources and then set those resources up early. and it's just an amazing resource and that might make the difference between like taking this course that's feels like a little bit of a risk to you but then being really able to um uh feel like okay I could I'm feel supported and I could take this risk and then you end up doing beautifully in the class because you have that personal interest plus you have the resources supporting you. >> Yeah. Also the people around you generally want you to do well. Um, your professors, uh, if you ask, will probably tell you how they want their essays written. Nine times out of 10, they might even give you an outline for what that looks like if you meet with them. It's happened to me before. Um, it's really, really helpful because especially if you take that class with that professor, again, you have a template for what to do next. >> Um, and then also the people around you who have already done that before, who have already gone through this before. Um maybe you have people who have taken um around you who've taken a class that you've already taken. This will be like this will probably happen at the like a little bit later on down the line, but also if you are connected to seniors who might be sort of coun in counselor positions at your institution, they might have already taken the classes you've already taken. They might know exactly what it is you're getting into and what you might need help with. Um so they can also be an amazing resource in that sense as well. >> Again, these are questions that you could return to over and over again. Um, and you'll have this resource available to you in our module. So, how do you get set up for success? Even before classes start, getting ready for classes in college is very different than in high school. More than ever, you are in charge of your learning. You are responsible for weaving together what you learn in lectures, discussions, readings, and assignments into your understanding of the topic. And you are responsible for finding the resources you need to learn the most you can. For [music] this discussion on class preparation, we are joined by Carly, a biomedical engineering major. Carly will share her positive experiences with office hours and tutoring and how she leveraged academic support resources. Starting a semester and preparing [music] for classes may seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be scary. And there are plenty of campus resources to make sure you get the help you need in order to succeed. The most important thing is all classes have a syllabus. A syllabus is a um document that goes over the um goals and purposes of the course, tells you what the projects or um homework or quizzes or tests are going to be, and it also gives you a weekby- week guide to the course. Um, and what I find as an instructor is that I as an instructor, I spend weeks working on my syllabus because for me as the instructor, that is the guideline I'm going to use for the entire semester or the entire quarter to help students like know what's coming up and to help me plan. But I find that when I give my students the syllabus either on paper or I direct them to the syllabus on our learning management system, the students often don't look at it and they're missing out on this great opportunity to get prepared for the course because everything really is in the syllabus. Yeah, I think like having gone through nearly four years of college now, um like the syllabus really is the most important part. it um like you said, it really does include everything. It tells you exactly like where all of the assignments and when and what they all are and at what point in the semester they all happen. Um, and yeah, I think also part of preparing for your classes is not just the individual classes, but your overall like course schedule in general. And being able to like have all of your syllabi like side by side and like looking to see cuz sometimes like a really important thing that is often overlooked when looking for classes is like at what time the big assignments occur for all of your classes. And sometimes like you have to prioritize a class over the other. And just having all of the syllabi next to each other um and seeing them at the same time is really helpful. But I think what students often overlook about the syllabus is that the syllabus gives you a guide to the content of the course and also a guide to what you should be learning and how you should be learning it. Um, so for example, um, the, um, the beginning of a syllabus often starts with something called a course description, which is like, okay, here are the main themes we're going to be looking at or the main topics we're going to be looking at over the course, and here's what I'm hoping you as a student will get out of the course. I'll give you an example from my own syllabi. Um, I tend to break my courses into units, right? And then I'll have a title for each of the units. Um and so that title will set that that will be the theme that we're going to be exploring for those two or three weeks. Um knowing that it means when I have a student reading an essay or reading a some um secondary literature or reading a novel um they're not just going in and just blindly reading it, right? that they're um they're reading with purpose because they know all the conversation for that week is going to be shaped around the questions that I've been talking about of course in class but that are also previewed in the syllabus. Um what's coming to mind right now is like I'm in a class called politics of reproduction right now. It's a sociology class and um we have readings. It's a seminar that meets once a week and so each week is kind of a separate topic. Um, but even in the syllabus with just like the week 11 or week seven or whatever it is, um, and just like the two words afterward that describe like what that topic is like before going into the readings too like makes me like remember that that is the main theme of that week and trying to like pull those themes from the reading. So there were some like birth in America or like reproductive governance and like just seeing those couple words that give a quick overview of like what that unit is about will um help me when in when doing the readings like parse out the things that are the more important things that the professor wants me to take away. Part of taking ownership of your education is to be thinking about where are you going to need maybe some extra assistance to get you through the um course. Um so maybe you are someone who doesn't like to write that much, right? Familiarizing yourself with the resources on your campus to support writing is really important. So, for example, many many universities have a writing center where students can go and um just drop in and get help with with their writing. So, looking for resources like that. On the math and science side, um figuring out how the tutoring system works um across the board at many many universities, going for tutoring isn't just something that you necessarily do just when you need help. Um, a lot of students take advantage of tutoring just to help them get like a little bit of extra information that may help their um, assignments go a little bit more quickly or whenever they just have a little bump, they may want to get some tutoring. Um, but tutoring takes a lot of different forms. Um, some departments have their own tutoring centers. Um, some universities have um, an academic resource center or an ARC that has tutoring for all different disciplines. Um often too um the um each class may have sessions with teaching assistants that are designed to help students get extra um support or office hours with the faculty member. So looking in the syllabus again we're going to we're going to go back to the syllabus and how important is in the syllabus right at the top for many of the um uh syllabi that I see there is the faculty members office hours and there is the time that the TA's office hours are there or the teaching assistants office hours are um there's um the section that you're in you know if it's a large lecture class you get to have discussion sections that's something to think out and often many faculty will say, "Oh, if you need additional tutoring, here are the places where you can get the tutoring and it's in the syllabus." Um, and to be able to to say, "Okay, you know, there's my faculty has office hours at this time. Can I go to those office hours?" Um, maybe you have another class at the same time. It's worth it to check with the faculty member. Hey, I've got a I've got a course at at another time that your office hours are. Um are you open to scheduling alternate times with students? And most faculty are um the um you know, so there are a lot of resources that you can anticipate using. And again, it's a little different than in high school because often like you you are trying and then you get into a little bit of academic difficulty and then you get the tutor. the way that students use tutoring now or use time with their office hours or use time with their TAs. Um it's to it's kind of more proactive, right? So, um like maybe you could talk a little bit about like some of the resources that are in your classes that like you kind of make note of when you're first looking at a class. Yeah, the office hours thing is definitely super important and especially like in my first two years when I was doing those STEM prerexs um mostly for like the math and physics courses at the beginning of the semester. It takes a little bit of time but I would put all of the office hours that were offered um into my Google calendar for all of my classes and I would write whether it was like the professor's office hours versus like a teaching assistant or teaching fellow's office hours. One of the other ways of preparing well is in the first couple of weeks maybe setting up like a study time with other people in the class or setting up a study group can be really really helpful and productive for you getting your work done. I mean it's it is important that you guys do work together. [laughter] Um but um having someone else that that you have in a group chat that you can ask questions about um the assignments that you're working on or like when is that assignment due? That's another kind of way of preparing for class, right? Um sometimes, especially if you're like in an extracurricular, maybe you're in an engineering extracurricular, you might just like sit around and say, "Okay, what classes is everybody in this year?" and see, oh, you're in that class. So am I. Let's get together and talk about it. Um, in my time at Yale, I've been in Society of Women Engineers. And, um, through that, I've met older students who are also in my major. And so, um, like these classes are oftent times they're not classes that are being taught for the first time, especially when it comes to like large prerequisite classes. And, um, people have done it before you. And so, just learning and like getting advice from the older students who have gone through the courses. um with the same professors or just even the same content can give you a lot of good advice on how to navigate going through the class. So when we say before the semester, how early do we mean by that? And like at what points can we or should we start preparing for the semester? Should it be the semester before, the week before classes start or how early? Yeah, that's a really great question. Um and I think it's especially challenging for um students who are stepping onto a college campus for the very first time, right? Um and I think the answer is kind of all of those, right? Um there are different things that you're going to be doing at different times in the leadup to the semester, right? So, um getting advice about um the the first year if you're a first year student um or maybe you're a second year student and you've just picked your major or you're about to pick your major. Finding out as much information about what the kinds of like expectations are for the program or department that you're in at large, I think is is really important. And that can start months before the beginning of that that first semester or the semester that you're you're thinking about. And that might include um meeting with an advisor. Um at many universities, you may come on campus for an orientation. Um and at larger universities, that orientation, you know, takes place two months before you start. All right? or they have different orientations and whatever week you sign up for that's when you get that information. Um so even before you come to orientation to spend some time on a on a campus website um just looking at well what are the requirements for four years you know how many credits do I need um you know looking like what's the difference between a credit which is the system that we use here at Yale we I think it's 36 credits are required that just like one credit is one class versus other universities it's credit hours and it's like 120 something credit hours or more um that they have to get. So like familiarizing yourself with the language of what's going to be expected of you as a student over the four years and if you have questions about that trying to get answers to them ahead of time so you know going in and again that can start months before you step on campus right and a lot of the information is available um on many of the websites it's a problem of trying to figure out where you look on the students website. One place to look is this thing called the registars's office, right? Um the registar is the unit at most universities that is responsible for registering you for classes. So they often will have a lot of information about when registration happens, but also be able to point you to distributional requirements. Um and they there's often documents um on departmental websites. So if you again kind of know what your major is heading into um college, you can look at that. Um but but also you'll get some guidance even from the orientation itself. Um but starting to familiarize yourself with that like sort of like college language um ahead of time. It doesn't take a ton of effort. Um, it just means you just sort of spend an hour or two, you know, at night sometime when you're done scrolling on TikTok to just, you [laughter] know, [gasps] look at it. Um, and and if you have questions, usually there are, um, chat bots available on the websites. I know Yale has a lot of chat bots. Um, there's also you may have a mentor already assigned to you. Um maybe it's your your you know your residential assistant, maybe it is um your adviser that you can send emails to and ask questions about just to get yourself oriented to what the requirements are and like the the ways in which they talk about the requirements. At most universities, you do register ahead of time um for your courses, but then there's usually about a space of a week where you would say you go to a course and it's not what it says it was on the syllabus or it you figure out that you don't actually have time to walk to that class and then walk back across campus to another class that you really really want to take. Um but it and but you would if you had the first class, you would um miss 20 minutes of of the class you really really want to take. So maybe it's not in your best interest even though you've signed up for the course. Maybe it's not in your best interest to actually take that course. You can um drop that course without a penalty in that first week sort of ad drop period and then you would add another course, right? Um, so, um, and adding that course could be, hey, you know, you are having a conversation in the dining hall with somebody and they're talking about this really fabulous course about a topic you'd never even heard before, but you're like, wow, that's super cool and you decide to go along in that first week to that class and you think, "Yes, I want to take this course and it fits into the rest of my schedule." Then you can often find a way to add that course, right? Um be at you know some at some universities like there is um there is a there people use that ad drop period pretty frequently. So even if maybe there's a course that you really wanted to have and um you weren't able to get into it, right? Some students may drop that course for a variety of reasons. It's just not the right time for them. again they it's not something that they thought it would work or the schedule doesn't work. Sometimes you can um go back and be able to add that class to your schedule right during the ad drop period. And again a lot of the information about how you can drop a course or add a course and again with the dropping of the course if you do it before the ad drop deadline within again usually about a oneweek period um you can do that for free. there's no penalty for dropping the course whereas if you drop a course later on in the semester sometimes you have to pay a fee um depending on your university. Yeah. Yeah. This is a really important thing. I've definitely I don't know anyone who has never added or dropped a class during ad drop period before. Um and [clears throat] especially for me like this semester even like even though coming into senior year I was like I know exactly which classes I need to take and like which ones I need to graduate and which ones I'm taking for fun. Um, and even going into this semester, I was like, my schedule's just not going to change at all. But I went to a seminar. Um, it was an education studies seminar. I was doing it for um, that specific reason, but I knew it was also cross-listed in the political science department. Um, and I was really really interested in the class topic. It was about the US federal education policy. Um, and I went to the class on the first day and like did the readings for the for that class and it was super interesting and super like I was like this is amazing. Like this is exactly the content that I signed up for. But I also was like during the class I was like I actually have no idea what any of my classmates are saying right now because most of them were coming from a political science background and most of them were either juniors or seniors as well. And so they have like all of this background and like knowledge that I just like couldn't keep up with. And um I think there are times in which like having a class like that that is challenging you and like you want and you're like really interested in and you can put a lot of work into um like works really well. But I knew that I also had major requirements that I needed to fulfill to graduate. Um and I also knew I had other things I wanted to spend my time with. Um and like given the course load, given like the intensity of like just the class in general and given my like very limited background and then in addition to like the papers and assignments from the syllabus that um we were seeing um I was like this is just not going to work with my course schedule. And then also on top of all of that it was also like right before another it was a once a week seminar that was right before another once a week seminar. So I was like and it was in between another class and I was like I can't be in class for 7 hours straight. So um it was a really sad day but it was it's like things like that where going to the first class will really inform like your decision on sometimes it's like the way the teacher teaches or lectures and other times it's just like the general vibe of the classroom like if you want it to be more discussion based in a seminar or if you want it to be more of a lecture-based class. Um and so ad drop period is very important for that. Um and the other thing you mentioned about like being able to add a class later like afterwards. Um I think the emphasis on add drop period often goes to the drop part where you're like I don't know if I want to take a class but you can as as you said like if a friend mentions a really cool class you can always add a class. And oftent times I'm also a peer leazison for the Asian-American Cultural Center right now. And so I also have like a group of first years who um we're navigating registration a couple weeks ago for the first time during college as opposed to before. Um and they were all really stressed um because we have a system now where it's a staggered registration like the seniors go first and then it goes down to the class years. And so the first years they were all really stressed because the classes that they wanted to take um were a lot of them were filled up already by the upper classmen. Um and I was like you guys don't need to fret. Like people will always drop classes during ad drop period. Like and if you if this is something that you either need to take like you can always ask the professor and like just reach out to them. Um you don't have to just be like on the other side of the screen. You can talk to them. Um, and things always change. Like I don't think an a single class has ever like not changed from the registration period. And so during that time you can also pick up classes that may have open spots left. >> Yeah. And and what you're talking about really is something again like connects with one of the themes that we're going to have in everything single session of of this course which is advocating for yourself. you know, you think that that, oh, I signed up for it and it's just going to be so hard to change. It's it's actually not, right? And but it does take a little extra effort on your part to go talk to that faculty member or to to go through the process of of of dropping a course, which at most universities isn't really that difficult. It's often just an online process, and a lot of students just don't take advantage of it because they just don't know that it exists. If you want to do things slightly differently, if there seems to be a roadblock in your way, don't keep it to yourself. Ask questions. See if there could be a way for you to take a course that's required for your major in another semester or if you really need to get into that course this semester. Is there a way to petition to get into the course? Um, and sometimes there are. Um, but it just takes the student asking, right? And and sometimes the answer is no. That's okay. Hey, at least you asked, right? >> Yeah. I think that's a really important emphasis is like the professors are also people. They also like a lot of times they're very understanding if you just like let them know what you might need and ask for yourself and ask ask for help and advocate for yourself. Um, and I think that was something that I didn't really like really really realize until going into those seminars because like in the lecture class like my professor is just like a person like on the other side of the room and like just talking at me. But if you ask for help like many of them can provide it. part of having of you being in charge of your own education is as a college student is being able to take all the advice that you get with kind of like a grain of salt and be able to kind of assess is this something that works for me or not. And I think the the the bad advice that my students often get is advice that is this is the way I did it and therefore this is the way you have to do it or there's only one way to do something and you have to do it in that exact way. Um now the way that they're being recommended maybe it worked for that person or for that mentor. Um, but that is not the only way to get things done at college. Um, and to to realize, okay, does this advice fit with what I really want to do? Is there some little feeling in your gut of like, I'm being told, but I don't feel comfortable actually doing it that way? Listen to that little piece. Ask, well, do I really have to do it that way? Are there other ways for me to do this in a different way? Um, and often the answer is yes. There are other ways of of accomplishing this goal or getting into this class or you know and all again all you have to do is ask. If you um have a need for an accommodation, make sure that gets set up really really early as you're coming into the university. Um, often you can reach out to those ac the uh accommodation offices. Sometimes it's called the disability resource center. Sometimes it's called the the student accessibility center or student accessibility services. Um but if you have anything like um ADHD, autism, anxiety, um you just a whole, you know, discalcula, um uh dyslexia, um all of those things you can get accommodations for. So, for example, if you um have ADHD, maybe you need to take your tests in an environment where you have very few distractions. That is an accommodation that can happen at the university. Um but you have to set them up really early and you have to to um and often the university will require documentation. So, um, having making sure that that as soon as you've made a decision that you're going to be going to a particular university and you think that you may need accommodations to make sure even that summer before that you have all of the paperwork that they need so that you can file it right away. Um, and some universities will even start um, taking that information over the summer before you begin. So, like that um, that's another support that can be really really helpful. Um and um at many universities they'll you'll meet with someone, they'll um identify the accommodations that work for you and then they give you what's known as an accommodations letter. But it's on you as the student to contact the faculty member and give them the letter. Now those letters will not tell you will not tell the faculty member why you needed accommodations. It won't tell you. It won't tell them anything about what your um diagnosis is or anything like that. It will just say this person, you know, requires the accommodation of time and a half on exams or this person requires the accommodation of lecture notes being available um before class or something like that. Um but that's really really super key. So, if you've had accommodations in the past or maybe you're somebody who's returning to school and you suspect, hey, I'm there might be something going on, um trying to to to get a diagnosis before you go. Um some universities are even really great. Like maybe you you didn't think you needed um support and then you get to college and you realize, you know, the level of support I need is different than what I see my other friends needing. you go, you can talk to those offices and sometimes they can help give you guidance as to um how to explore, you know, that area of need and whether or not you may be qualified for a certain diagnosis. So, um that's a that's another thing to to be another resource that doesn't get talked openly about as much, but is so super important for student success. So, Carly, I'm going to ask you to think way back to your very first semester here um in college. What was that experience like for you? And then what did you learn from those first few weeks of class that helped prepare you for going through that process of starting each subsequent semester? >> Yeah. Um my first week of classes was very hectic. Um my first class was a chemistry class and um I had taken chemistry in high school. I I'd gone to um an IV school, an international balorate school. So I took chemistry as an IV class and I was like okay I can like definitely and I tested into um like I from the test results they were like you can take advanced general chemistry one and I was like okay. And so I like was super excited going into the class and chemistry was also my favorite class in high school. And I went to the class and I was like, I have no idea what the professor just said. I also like don't remember how to be a student and all of those things. Um and so I was in a position where um I was stuck between cuz in high school I think like a lot of students will push themselves and like try to take as the hardest classes they can that are being offered at the school. Um, and I was really stuck between um, pushing myself in the advanced gen Gen Con class. Um, and also like balancing the rest of my schedule and like adjusting to college and all of those things. Um and yeah, I stuck with that class for a couple weeks. But I think in like week three after a drop period had ended, um I was like this class is actually I actually have no I I like really have no idea what's going on in this class and I don't think I can catch up and I don't think I can learn this content like while balancing my other classes. Um and so I asked to I spoke with the professor. I spoke with my dean um who was doing the academic advising at the time um and I spoke with other classmates and people who I knew were in the general chemistry class um and I decided that that general chemistry class was a much better fit for me um and decided to drop that um but at the same time I was also um I think but going into um like I was I I'd also come into college as a biomedical engineering prospective major And so I knew there were all of these prerequisites I needed to fulfill. Um, and one thing that some schools will do is like provide a road map of exactly which classes you need to take each semester to fulfill your major requirements. Um, and for um, BME at Yale, they told us to take the intro bio, intro, and math all at the same time in the first [laughter] semester. And I was like, okay. So, I registered for all three of those classes and then I also was like, hm, well, I need to take a language class, too. So, I registered for um ASL and those were so for at Yale it would be the four and a half credits, which is a pretty standard amount for each semester. Um, and I was like, okay, well, that's that that is what it is. But I do wish some someone or some magical information would have appeared where it told me to not take those three classes at the same time because they were also very intensive classes. And I think also my mindset like going from high school um the high school I went to had a block schedule and so we had eight different classes in each semester and you would take four each day and I was like okay like I'm going from eight classes a semester to four. Like it'll be easy breezy. like there's actually there's no problem with this. Um that was not the case. [laughter] Not the case at all actually. Um and so I think learning also in those first few weeks um that courses are set up very differently in high school than they are in college. Um and just the structure like you're not in class all day from what 8 to 230. Um, and you're also, so it feels like you're in class a lot less time and you're like, I have more time, but also my class is a lot harder. So, it's it's really like all of those things um happening at the same time and then also adjusting to college in general. Like, it's not just the classes, there's also like the social adjustment and like sometimes like the location can be very different. Um, and yeah, all of those things like at the same time I was like looking back at it, I'm like I really I feel like someone should have told me to not do all of that. But again, it's just something that I had to learn by going through it. I guess you do need to be told these things. Like you just you don't know these things when you're coming into college. And so I think also like giving yourself grace to like learn it and like it just takes time sometimes. Like you can also like even if you like wrote down everything, if someone wrote down everything and like told it to you, sometimes it really doesn't like settle into your brain and you like you don't really understand it until it happens. And so um yeah, I think like taking time to really let yourself just learn it as it goes is really important as well. So the biggest challenge to success in college is managing your time. College influencers will tell you there are easy hacks to manage your time. Planning every second of your day on your calendar, using color-coded spreadsheets to keep track of your assignments, sacrificing your sleep and your self-care to make deadlines. Here's the truth. Time management is not about finding the perfect external system. The biggest myth is that if you find the right algorithm, you'll achieve perfection. Your goal isn't to schedule your every move until midnight. Your goal is to establish structure and routine that protects your downtime and lets you be healthy and engaged. I chose to talk with Rudy for this topic because he came to college after being in the workforce. He has experience managing his time as a full-time [music] employee and as a college student. Rudy shares this human approach to [music] time management. We hope that after this module, you leave the anxiety of constant comparison to other students behind. you will have the confidence to say no when you need to and say yes to the things that are important to you. So, we're here today to talk about time management. >> Um, and one of the biggest myths about time management is if you get some kind of system and you get like the top 10 things to do to manage your time and you do all of that, you're going to be able to manage your time. >> Yeah, that's a great point. >> It's not true. Right. And I mean, I've been out of college for a while and time management is still a struggle for me because it's always going to be a struggle. >> And I think one of the things that that students do is they just assume, all right, I've got to prioritize school. So, I'm going to start with school. Um, but what we're going to talk about, I think, over, you know, our conversation and the rest of this module is really about how, um, you have to kind of set a base first, a baseline of, for lack of better terms, self-care. Making sure you have the environment that's going to enable you to do your work. Then think about building a routine. Um because it's the routine that helps you get things done, break up your time. Um and then finally, I the the third thing is being able to reach out to the resources that will hold you accountable to getting things done. So that's those are sort of the three pillars of time management that can really help students thrive at college. there's a lot of anxiety and pressure to like be perfect every moment of the day and that can just feel overwhelming. And I think one of the first things I do is I try to be a little bit patient and forgiving of myself understanding that I'm going to try to plan for certain things, but life is going to happen. You know, >> you're kind of describing it as like a human approach >> to time management, right? It's not about getting everything on your to-do list done. It's about using the time you have in the the way that works best for you. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And that that's unique to each individual. >> I think you're right. And and I think um you know, I have friends um who um are amazing with how they manage their time, but they they physically do it different for me. So, as an example, um I have a close friend who who um keeps um just like a pocket journal and like every day we'll itemize the specific things that need to get done within certain time blocks and we'll just like as a mini reward will swipe them off as soon as they're done. There's like an excitement around it. There's an excitement around like having that checklist and seeing that progress. Um I've I've tried it. I' I've tried to be that person. I have lost so many notebooks. Um and um and it I'm fully aware that it's just not for me. Um and uh a counter example to that is that something that I work on regularly are not just the things that that help me manage my time, but really thinking about the type of activities that take up a lot of my time and then how do I minimize that? But common themes across the board are the ideas that we know the positions that take up most of our time and we're trying to prioritize how to really know what we need to do because I find that that's really what we're trying to figure out, right? We're not just trying to figure out, did I complete the series of tasks between 8:30 and 10:30 like I said I would. It's really more like, okay, do I know where I'm at for tomorrow? I think that what really matters um is trying to create some sort of hierarchy for what's the most important thing that needs to get done and when in what ordered form. Um there's a funny algorithm um bringing this to computer science that I learned um that essentially was like a time management algorithm. It's just a time series and all it does is it says, "Hey, the thing that's most important you should do first, right?" And and it's just it's so interesting to have like as a ULA, an undergraduate learning assistant for algorithms in this class to uh to be writing out this formula and we're all like this seems pretty obvious, right? But we the fact that it had to be notated and it works efficiently uh just speaks to like how often we don't even really think about it as a tool that we that can benefit us. And I I think though that one of the struggles is that students don't necessarily feel that they have as much power over their time to prioritize it and to control when what they're doing when. And I think it for some students it's a legacy of you know going straight from high school into college where you're at school six and a half hours a day and all that time is scheduled for you or you're coming from the workforce and you know you're at work for eight hours a day you know or more um and that but often that time is scheduled for you as a manager. I think one of the big things is, you know, one of the benefits of a college education and the approach that I'm encouraging students to take, which is to have ownership over their education. But that also means having ownership and responsibility over time. What did you struggle with when you first came, you know, from community college and also you were in the workforce, now you're a full-time student. like what was the shift that you had to make um in terms of your own relationship to time management that really helped you succeed um in college? >> Uh so two things there I think. The first one is um first accepting that um these things are happening whether you attending them or not and it's in your best interest to try to attend them whatever that is. if it's a class, if it's an office hour session, if it's, you know, just um date night with your partner because you need to prioritize it or spending time with your kids. Like these these are different things that carry different values that are important to people. Um and they matter. Um so I think the first one is like just understanding like the reality between like what's that cost? What's the opportunity cost for completing that action and just being okay with saying, "Hey, I just can't do that thing today." Right? I think there's a lot of pressure. Um, and I find this to be consistent across just students in general, like whether it's high school or college or even graduate school that I'm in now. Um, to have to be at the thing for the sake of missing out for that that FOMO idea that the fact that you might not be in that Instagram photo or you might not make that one connection at one time. I think it's okay if you learn to be a little bit more patient with yourself that sometimes you just don't have the bandwidth for that one last thing that was the extra mile, right? And I think that um obviously within reason uh we want to make sure that we're prioritizing, you know, our mental health and our our physical health. Um, but I'm I'm relating it more to like, you know, an additional rugby practice that I really want to make, but it's between that or getting a few more hours of sleep or just, you know, hosting office hours myself. Like, it's okay to kind of let go in the short term. Um, as long as you're trying to plan for it accordingly. >> I think where students get discouraged or get ground down is when they find themselves doing a lot of things and they don't know why they're doing it. So, weirdly, part of time management is also um identifying for yourself why you're doing everything you're doing, right? Um and again, not everybody loves every part of of their college experience. Not every person who works loves every part of their job, right? But if you have a reason or a goal or an understanding of why you're doing it, then that's going to make the um getting into your work more purposeful. A lot of the students I see who get really overstressed and feel like they don't have enough time. Um they they are really trying to prioritize meeting all their deadlines, right? Which is important. You're in college. You're you want to meet the deadlines that your your faculty members set. the deadlines for your extracurriculars, the deadlines for, you know, your campus jobs and things like that. Um, but part of the reason they get so exhausted is that they aren't paying attention to um the other parts of their life that create that kind of stability that allows them to work most efficiently. I'll give you the big number one example is sleep, >> right? >> You know, students students think, "Oh, I'm gonna I have a deadline tomorrow. I'm not gonna I'm gonna pull a allnighter or I've got four hours I can sleep. Um, and then their paper isn't as strong as it should be because they they haven't mentally rested. They haven't created the conditions for themselves where they can optimally and efficiently use that time. One of the things I am always recommending to students is do you have a consistent time that you go to sleep and a consistent time when you wake up? because those two things provide structure for your day and they hit one of those basic requirements for you to have, you know, a strong and stable platform for you to work from and that's, you know, making sure you're getting enough sleep. >> No, that's a great point. and and the sleep one. I'm happy you brought that up because I I think um sometimes especially for returning adults uh we might I remember I I came up in a corporate culture where um you know you just kind of had to hustle and hustle meant just working extra hours coming in on weekends. I remember precoid it was normal to have someone in with a flu because it showed that you were committed to the cause. um things that we would just not consider at all today anymore thankfully so um but that also meant that um your health was the first thing that kind of took a hit on that uh your in your quality of sleep the type of sleep sometimes unhealthy eating or drinking habits um I think that um I think you're right I I think it's very easy to feel overwhelmed um and sometimes you know procrastination can definitely be a part of that But it's it it then feels like you're trying to catch yourself out of this ditch and the one day to do it is just shovel all night. And I just don't know that allnighters work consistently. Um and if there's something that I know has for peers that I that I really admire is that they get consistent good quality nights of sleep. I you know I'll meet new students. I will do orientation. full talk and and I'm const I I've heard especially this last year with new students who don't know me like they they know I'm doing this I'm doing this club sports I'm in graduate school I'm I'm trying to help out when I can I used to volunteer for different causes around campus and common questions were just like how like like I don't I don't understand where you're getting the hours in a day and I used to make this joke about like well I just don't sleep right but the reality is of course I'm sleeping I I think it's just more like deciding where to allocate my time and being okay that I can't do it all >> right and and again like academics my time with my partner definitely take priorities because these things need to get done but there are just going to be a few social events sometimes where it's like hey I would love to go do X Y or Z but unless I'm willing to move that in a hierarchy somewhere else and then move something down >> I can't do it because they can't squeeze everything in at the same place >> and the other thing I like to remind students is that they're you you know, most students are going to have eight semesters of school of between their first year and their and their last um semester. That's a long time. That's a lot of time. And that you know if you choose to take a step back for a little while so that you can take care of yourself and take care of your mental health, take care of your physical health, it doesn't mean that those opportunities go away because you're one of the things about college is the opportunities are being generated all the time. And if there's an opportunity that either isn't right for you or it's just not coming at the right time for you, another opportunity is going to be available at the time that you're ready to take it, right? Um and I think that that that is um a challenging thing for our students to to really believe, right? because some of the myths that are there among the students is um oh you have to do this thing you have to have this particular path um and then the reality is no you don't like every single student is on their own path and that involves you know also like if you're trying I think you've referenced it a little bit like sometimes if you're comparing yourselves to others and you see students who seem to have it all seem to be doing everything and you're like gosh I wish I could be that person well you're not that person. You're you and you have your own priorities and the your own things that you want to to accomplish. And so, one of the things that actually I think is great about um prioritizing time management is that it also forces you to reflect and take a step back and say, "Hey, wait a minute. Am I filling all these things on my calendar? Like, why am I saying yes to three different dance troops in my extracurriculars? or why am I taking on all these extra hours in the library? Do I really need to have all those extra hours for the library job? Well, actually, maybe I need those library job hours more than I need to be doing three different dance troops. Maybe cut down to one dance troop or like sometimes students try to take as many courses as they can to get the college experience as quickly as they can. I mean, and that's a legit thing because college is expensive. you want to get through in as short amount of time, but sometimes when you jam-pack things, you don't get to have the full experience. >> Yeah. >> No, you're right. I'm so uh grateful that you said that. Um the same way we don't have the same habits, we don't have the same academic lived experience, right? Like none of us get a say in the neighborhoods we grew up in. as children, we don't have a say of the schools that we're exposed to or the type of literature that we'll have access to. Um, and we do the best that we can with the resources that we have. Um, and um, within that, uh, that also means that we build different habits around like how do we study, how do we concentrate, how do we allocate our time. If there's something that I want, uh, students to take away is that you're not a lost cause if you feel like you don't have it right today. And that's the goal. The goal is that you're working on it and you're trying to figure it out. I feel like I just barely started figuring it out. Like, and I can see so many opportunities that I have for my own personal development. But I think about how I spend my time today in this week and this month compared to six years ago. And I'm just so much more excited about the type of concentration I'll be able to have going forward knowing that there are opportunities. But that doesn't mean that I think of my past as like wasted time and I hope that other students won't either. >> Yeah, exactly. This comes to one of the things that that is a theme throughout all the all of the discussions we're going to be having around how to succeed in college, but specifically for time management. I mean, one is that what we're talking about is you have to manage your day-to-day time, your week-toeek time, but also to make time in those weeks to be thinking a semester, two semesters >> 100%. >> People on our campus that I refer students to, sometimes I refer them to a college advisor or a dean um or a faculty member and those are all resources to talk about like maybe that future stuff, right? that um you know the 15 minutes that you spend after class talking to a professor about hey how did you get interested in this right if you're curious about the work that they did um that is 15 minutes really well spent in terms of of um thinking about your future I often see the students who overched themselves right that you know their day starts at 6:00 a.m. into the gym and doesn't end till midnight. And it's not just that they're not sleeping, but they're not giving themselves any downtime. They're not giving themselves any time to really explore. They've they've overcommitted themselves with the idea that the key to college success is to do everything. >> And again, to get back to this theme that we've been talking about in terms of priorities is not to do everything. That's not what is going to make employers want you when you when you graduate. They are going to be asking, well, tell me about your specific experience. Like, what's one project that you feel proud of? You know, what is um one experience that you had that changed your thinking? Like I I mean, I know I've been in interviews where they've asked me questions like that. And so if you've scheduled all of your time, you're spending all your time doing. But part of the reason to go to college is to have the opportunity to take a step back and reflect and to explore in a relatively safe place. And like while you have these anchors to your week, if you're creating a weekly routine, you're making sure that you're getting your work done for the week. Um, but within that to have like for me when I was in college, I I was an early riser. I would schedule most of my classes in the morning, >> have an occasional seminar in the afternoon. Um, but by four o'clock my brain was done, you know, but that was great because that was the time when I would like head out to the campus, you know, I was in a residential college, head out to the campus green or to the fields of the edge of thing and I'd go for a walk, play frisbee, you know, [laughter] uh, play rugby in your case, right? um you know be just sit and listen to music, go get coffee with a friend. Those kinds of things are also really really important to your college experience. I'm happy >> you brought that up. >> You know, you want to go do frisbee, go do frisbee. You want to go cro, I don't know, crochet, crochet. Join a debate team if that's something you really want to do, right? Like there's so many things that you can do. And it and even then, they don't have to be um academic related. They can be a part of your community that you're involved with. They could be a part of your, you know, maybe um your religious order. Whatever the case, whatever brings you peace and knowing that you're spending your time well, give that a shot. >> One of the biggest differences [music] between high school and college is the pace. Students ask, "How am I supposed to take useful notes when the professor is covering the [music] material from three chapters in one lecture?" College requires a new approach to time and accountability. Unlike high school, professors are asking you to be on top of your own work. You're expected to take the initiative [music] to ask for additional resources and help that you may need to learn how to approach this transition to college classes. I spoke with a STEM major in applied mathematics, Deja. As someone who successfully balances demanding theoretical math and [music] computer science courses, she understands the ruthless speed of college life. This module isn't just [music] about maximizing 75 minutes of class. It's about ensuring that your education becomes exactly what you want to make of it. Okay. So, our topic for today is really learning about how students can really optimize their time in the classroom when they're in class. And that includes preparing for class, taking notes, participating, and then reviewing after class. Um, so we're just going to have a nice great conversation about all of these different things. Well, I'm going to ask you to take a little bit of step back in time and think about what it was like for you in the, you know, when you first started college, like what to you was the biggest difference between like the time you would spend in class in high school and the the the way it felt to be in class in college? Like what were some of the big differences that you remember noticing when you first stepped on on campus? Yeah, one of the biggest differences I noticed when I stepped on campus was just how fast college classes go. You know, my high school teachers always told me like, oh, like, you know, in college you have to fit a year's worth of material in a semester, so everything goes fast-paced. But I really didn't know how fast-paced until I walked into my first calculus class and he was like, "Hi, my name is so and so. We have pets every Wednesday, office hours on these day. Okay, topic one." I'm like, "Whoa, like what happened to syllabus week?" like what happened to getting to know you like wow we're just jumping in and you know you're going through so many topics every week you're going through a chapter's worth of material every week every week and a half then it's on to the next thing on to the next thing I didn't have any classes like that in high school so if you're really struggling here you have to be the one to take the initiative out and get that help versus in high school you know when there's only 20 25 30 people in the class it's much easier for a teacher to identify like Hey, like you're there. And also in like a high school, like it's much easier for a teacher to like grab you. Like they know your schedule. They can like call you down to the principal's office, call you down to their office, like give you detention if it's really that serious versus here. Like you're living your life here. You're an adult here. And so a professor really is not going to force you to do something you don't want to do. So if you are failing and you don't put in the effort to go into office hours or tutoring or whatever else like they're just going to let you fail and there's really like none of that like handholding that's in college. I love your last point. It's not that the that like people want you to fail but they are asking you to be on top of your own work and then ask for the additional resources or additional help that you need. And I think that's um both something that is a little intimidating to students and it's also something that's that's partly freeing. Like that's one of the things is you you make of your education what you want to make of it. >> Yeah, I definitely agree. Yeah. I mean in college there's that flexibility that everyone loves so much like oh you get to be an adult but you're not paying bills but it's this but it's that. But it also means that you have to set your schedule. So, you had to really hold yourself accountable in a way that you didn't have to in high school. >> Some people think that a lecture just means you're in a big lecture hall and someone, you know, the professor is going to be on the stage and they're going to be going through a PowerPoint and or going through equations on the board and you just have to take a bunch of notes and process everything. Um, and then the seminar often students think that okay, well that's just like a smaller class, right? um when actually these are you know I I can say as a um faculty member um these are actually two different modes of delivering um uh content and two different ways of engaging in education. And so being able to think a little bit about the um mode in which you're learning whether that's a seminar or a lecture can really help you prepare uh effectively for the course. So one thing about lectures a lot of lectures um are a lot of f first year and second year students spend a lot of time in lectures. Why is that? Well lectures are sort of broad introductions into the field right? So there are going to be multiple topics as you already mentioned you know sometimes these topics change from week to week. Um but it's there for the students to get an overview or an orientation to the field. Part of the challenge for students is if you want to have a good understanding of the background of a field. Part of your job as a student is to process and organize the information that you're getting not only from your professor but also from your readings and also from you know many of the lectures will have discussion um sections with a faculty member. So you're processing information from that. If you're taking a STEM course, you know, sometimes those discussion sections or those those office hours are opportunities to understand how a con how a concept relates to uh a process. Maybe a process for solving an equation or maybe it's a process that happens in biology um or it's a scientific process. Um but you learn that by discussing those things with your peers, right? Um and so the the role of the student in a lecture very much is to take in all this information from all these different sources um and try to organize it so that they have a good solid understanding of the topic that the course is is presenting. Um seminars are different. Seminars tend to be a little bit more exploratory. Often it's a a professor or an instructor and you know eight people, 12 people, 15 people, 20 20 people. Most of the seminars I know max out around 25 students. And the purpose of that is to take a deep dive into one area within a larger field. And part of the purpose of a seminar isn't just to learn as much as you possibly can about that, but also to kind of play with that knowledge and build on that knowledge through conversation with other students and with the professor. So seminars tend to be really participationheavy. Um tend to have students talking to each other a lot. Um, and the goal is um both understanding the material but also sometimes being able to offer your own new perspective on it. Uh, and that's still possible in a lecture, but that often in the lecture circumstance that takes place in the exams and in the papers that you write in a lecture class. Whereas in a seminar class that kind of um creating new knowledge by conversing with other people, asking questions about the kinds of research that's come before like that's um that's a place where you can try out ideas and see if they work um and get feedback on them immediately in the conversation that you're having in the seminar. I mean, one of the biggest misconceptions I had about lectures and seminars was that lectures are for STEM classes and seminars are for non- STEM classes, which no, I mean, I had a humanities class that was in a 90 person lecture room. I was like, "Oh, I didn't know y'all did this, too." Like, hello. And then I've had a CS class where it was just me and like 15 other people. So, I'm not used to a professor knowing my name. Like, this is different. One thing when I'm working with my students um that that I consult with, they're like, "Oh, I'm struggling with this class." And one of the first questions I ask often is, "How do you prepare for class?" And then they look at me very blankly and say, "I'm supposed to prepare for class." Of course, people will do their homework or do their reading before class, but there are other ways of preparing for class beyond just doing the readings or maybe approaching the readings or approaching the assignments in a particular way. I know for me like if I'm approaching something like theoretical math or something that's really like complex proof heavy like dense sort of material I know that I need an introduction to the topic before it's introduced in class. So especially if it's a class like linear algebra or differential equations where I know it's like you know a class offered at every university it's been taught for years and years and years. I know there's a lot of materials online whether on YouTube or readings or this that and the third that I can find about the material. So, I'll look at the syllabus, see what sort of things we're covering for the week, and watch a few videos to prepare for it. Not to necessarily say that I'm trying to learn the material before it's actually taught, but just so that I have one curse like, okay, like this is the sort of things that we're going to be talking about. So that when I see it again in class, it's not like I'm completely lost. Cuz I noticed when I do try to go into class just completely like, okay, I guess I'll just show up and learn what I learned. I'm more so focused on just trying to get the words down and learn it later, which is not very productive. Like, if you're spending 75 minutes, 50 minutes in a class already, you might as well use that time productively. We tend to underell ourselves and also tend to think everybody else has like it more together than every than than we do. Um, and really it's not that the that the students who come in and are are talking in uh, you know, who seem to know what's going on in class. It tends to be the students who are doing the very things you're talking about, right? They prepare ahead of time and what they're doing is just familiarizing themselves with the material. It gives them what I call anchors, right? just a tiny little list like some bullet points of okay, you know, I know this idea is going to be important or um I'm looking for this concept or I'm looking for this application. Um just having that at the top of your notes can help you when you do get lost or something gets really confusing, you can go back and think, okay, like where are we? What are we talking about? Oh, right. It's probably related to this thing that I looked up like the night before. And it even applies to like I mean you were talking more so about like the non- STEM classes but even for your STEM classes I know my proof based like math classes like it really builds on top of each other and things we divined three weeks ago are going to come up again. So just taking the time to like not even to necessarily do an hourlong deep dive like learn the material but just 15 minutes of like okay like this is a general idea of what we're going to be learning like what from the past are we going to be talking about again? Because if you go in with like a I kind of understand this old stuff and then we build on top of the shaky foundation, it's not happening. Like you're gonna be lost. That that building is falling. Like I'm sorry. So to make sure you just have a strong foundation and whatever you previously learned so that you can go into the next class ready to absorb more information >> is really helpful. We expect that students will be prepared. Um, we also expect in some ways that students come prepared with their own takes on things, right, and their own ideas. And again, I'm I'm speaking a little bit more from the humanities perspective, and I'd actually love to hear like how you see that from the STEM perspective. I mean, one of the major differences in college that I talk about a lot is in high school, a lot of the readings and things that are assigned, it's to ensure that that that students can show that they comprehend what they're reading and that they that they really fully understand it. And in college, there is that comprehension piece, but it's also the critical analysis piece. Like, not only can you understand this material, but what do you think about it? How would you analyze the arguments that a person is presenting? um you know does one question that I ask a lot in my with my students especially when I'm teaching um uh my writing my first year writing courses um you know we'll read two essays around the same topic and I'll ask them okay so how does essay number two affect the think the ways that you thought about the topic um how does it make you think differently um versus how you thought about it after reading just essay number one Right. And so, and why, that's the other big thing that I think is the huge difference between high school and college is like college professors are way more interested in the why. Um, and um, you know, for for you to be prepared to to talk about like, well, you know, I really thought this part of the essay or this part of the argument was a strong argument, but I actually had questions about this part of the argument, and here are what my questions are. are and maybe we can again in a seminar setting maybe you offer those questions to the broader audience and maybe you come in with a list of questions that you want to ask. You don't necessarily have to ask all of them or even any of them but to be coming prepared with questions that you want to ask that will help the conversation flow in that seminar. But I would also love to hear from you like that STEM piece like like how do you think that um you get to have sort of your own voice in a STEM class? So, I'll say with intro level STEM classes, you're not gonna have a voice. I'm sorry. Like, there's not really a whole bunch of takes on calculus, too. Like, there's a right and a wrong, and that's like kind of that. But, as I've noticed now that I'm a junior, I'm taking more advanced classes. Like, instead of having a final exam, you're more so having like final projects and final papers. And that's where your creativity really gets to show. I know for my computational linguistics class this semester, we've learned about all these different machine learning models and how they're applied to language processing and understanding. And for the class, we get a final project and people are doing all sorts of things. I know I'm doing a project that's looking at dialects, specifically African-American vernacular English, and how chat models understand African-American vernacular English. I know for a computational psychology class, we also had a final project and I did mine on like simulating computationally simulating race memory. Oh, do we see a theme? I like race. I don't know. But then someone else did theirs on like your natural ability to understand music and someone else did theirs on like syntactic structure of language and someone did theirs on like gun stuff. Like it was just a whole bunch of random stuff and you saw people presenting their work and it was like wow. Like I didn't even know like this model could be applied in this way. Like so that's really like the beauty of a class like that where it's like people from all these different disciplines applied math CS psych this that and the third which you tend to get in these huge like lectures you know like general lectures like linear algebra differential equations apply to a lot of different majors a lot of different fields. So you're going to have people from a bunch of different departments coming together. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it and it makes it exciting to be in class, right? Like you have a purpose for being in class. And I think that's something that again is one of those big shifts from being in high school to being in college is that um your fellow students and your professors um will be interested in the unique vision or the unique questions that you are interested in. I will say though that I know that classroom participation can be really intimidating to students, right? I you know I was that student at some point in my in my career, especially in STEM classes. I never ask questions in STEM classes. Like give me a novel, I'll talk all day long, but you know, talk to me about the KB cycle. And I'm like, I don't know. Um and the I I think that um you know a lot of faculty because they know how important that class partition patient is sometimes we require it. It's like you know 5% of your grade 10% of your grade. Um and so some strategies for doing for participating when you're maybe not feeling like you know you might be feeling anxious about it or you might feel students might feel um a little bit hesitant because you know they are sitting in a room with a hundred of their peers. At first I was pretty intimidated to participate in class especially as a black woman in STEM. There's a lot of times where I'm one of the only if not the only person that looks like me in class. So, I found that pretty intimidating. And then just being in that space and then me asking a question during class is like, "Oh, like I guess she's really not supposed to be here." And it's like, "Oh, I don't know." But I mean, on one hand, I definitely do still feel that sort of way, but on another, it's like, well, I mean, I kind of stand out already. Like, I can't really change the fact that I'm black or woman. So, I mean, the professor knows me. even if he just recognizes my face, he's gonna know me. So, I might as well make him learn my name, too. Like, [laughter and gasps] might as well get something out of it. So, that really gave me the courage when I started thinking about that. I was like, "Oh, well, if he's going to notice me anyway, might as well have him know me as Deja." Um, so I started raising my hand and engaging with the material more. participation lets the professor get to know you and that is such a crucial part of getting your college education because it's not yeah I mean obviously it is about learning the material but it's also about like human interactions and growing and changing as a student and when you get to speak in class with your peers and you get ideas from your peers and you're literally like changing in the moment because your brain is changing your mind is changing, right? But more and more faculty are trying to make their courses interactive because we know that students learn better when they they have more active learning. So if you do have some pieces that are still shaky from the previous classes, you might be able to ask, hey, how does this new material relate to what we learned like last week? And that's a great question to ask because I bet you at least 50% of the students in that class are asking the same question of themselves. And it gives the faculty member an opportunity to kind of clarify, oh, this is um um these are how these things are connected. >> Yeah. Heavy on the half the class is confused. I know me like when I'm confused, I'm going to ask a question like close mouths, don't get fed. Like I'm going to raise my hand and I can't tell you how many times after class someone came up to me was like, "Girl, I'm so glad you asked that. I don't know what's going on." I'm like, "Me too." you know, you can always like save all your questions till the end and ask them personally if you're not okay with that. And then professors obviously also have office hours at least once a week. So, and no one really goes to them like which is like real like it's pretty intimidating to go to the office hours with the professor themselves versus like you know uh peer tutoring or something like that which is like oh like someone in your grade maybe a year above you versus like the professor. So, um, those office hours tend to be a little bit more quiet. You can get a little bit more individualized help from the person that's literally teaching you it. So, they have a good understanding of it. And it's also just interesting to talk to professors. They're obviously much more senior in their field. So, they've lived a multitude of lives. Like, just talking to the professors has exposed me to sort of career paths I didn't even know existed and like fellowships I didn't know existed, like jobs you could get, like this, that, and the third. So just having that connection is always nice. But then like oh like if you need letter of recommendations if you like do a summer opportunity that requires it or apply to a job that requires it like you're going to need it from a professor or to get involved in their research. Like having that in with a professor is really nice. So like don't be afraid to engage. One thing that changed my mentality with it is that it's literally part of a professor's job to engage with the student body. Like that's like one of the main reasons they're there. like one of their number one responsibilities. So like they expect you to ask questions. They expect you to go to their office hours. They expect you to reach out, which is like part of what we were saying before. Like in college, like you're much more expected to take that first step and take that first leap. Cuz if you're lost or if you want to talk to them or this that the third, they're not going to find you. Like most of the time, they don't even know your name. So they're definitely not going to sit up here and be like, "Oh, Deja, like where you been, girl?" like like they're not going to reach out to me personally. So, you have to be the one to take that step. But then they're also more sympathetic. When you do maybe need an extension or a dean's excuse or something like that, who do you think they're going to be more sympathetic to? Someone that they know the name of or someone that they can't really gauge how well they're doing in the class. And I find that again the students that I that I talk to sort of individually, sometimes they're like, Karen, I I don't know how to take notes, right? Because I think sometimes we get in our heads that everybody's got to have like some kind of like perfect system for taking notes. Um or sometimes they go into a class and they had a system that worked in one class and they switch it to a different kind of class and it doesn't work for them anymore. [snorts] Um what are some of your experiences with note takingaking? Like how do you think about note-taking and how do you approach it? So when it comes to note takingaking, I think first I really have to identify like what works for me for this specific class. So that includes like a bit of experimentation. Um you know sometimes I go to class and I just like copy everything down like a monkey and maybe that'll work, maybe that won't. Um then I'll switch it over. Okay, maybe I'm not going to class but I'm watching the recordings later on so that I can like pause it when I need to fast forward, rewind, search something up, take the time. I know that that personally works for me, having that time to like be able to pause the professor because you can't like in the middle of class be like, "Wait, let me write that down real quick." Like, so being able to watch the recording later on or even live, just not being in the room and being able to pause it and like search something up or get clarification or take more time with an example to work something through really helps me, especially in my applied classes. um for my theoretical math classes. [gasps] I'm still trying to figure that out myself, but that's where the pre-work really does come in. I do try and like look at it beforehand, make sure that I have the definitions and everything sort of locked in, but it's just so fast like you know, they go so fast like I don't know what to say. So developing shorthands so that you know you understand like you don't need to write every single word on that board and maybe these notes will be unintelligible to the next person but as long as it makes sense to you if you develop a system where you know that this means that and this means that like I know some people like to take really messy notes before like during class and then go after it when they when they have the time and like make it pretty like take the time to digest it refer to the notebook especially where classes that are very dense like oh we covered for three chapters in one class. That's cool. >> I think what you're really highlighting is that notetaking in class is just a way of processing what you're hearing as you're hearing it. Note takingaking really is an opportunity for students to kind of frame that the pieces of information that they're getting and framing it for themselves so that they can make sense of it. You open your syllabus and you see the assigned reading for the next class. Three tiny bullet points represent 100 pages of required reading and instantly you are overwhelmed thinking [music] there's no way I have time to read all of this. The sheer volume you face in college is fundamentally different from high school. [music] It can be hard to determine what to skim and what to read slowly and carefully. But how you read effectively for college is shaped by the theme of this course. You are in charge of what you learn. Your goal for reading [music] in college is not necessarily to absorb every single word. [music] Rather, your goal is to get something out of the reading so that you can make an informed contribution to the class discussion and or anchor your essays and assignments. [music] For this module, you will hear Nyx's structured process for reading in college. As a humanities [music] major, they often have heavy reading loads. Hopefully, you will pick up some strategies that will help you gain control over your learning. By using pre-ereading, active reading, and post-reading strategies, you will be able to identify the author's main argument and become an active, confident, and critical contributor to your class [music] conversation. So, Nyx, we were just talking about uh before we started recording, like how I feel like the reading that I did and the way that I read when I was in school way back in the 1980s is very different than um the way that I see my teenage children reading now. It seems like, you know, I I would sometimes spend a couple hours a day just reading for pleasure. Um, and I know my my kids are doing that, too, but it's often on the internet. It's often, you know, I would be reading a novel. They in that space of two hours could be reading, you know, news articles, entertainment. But here we are, you know, a lot of faculty are my age and grew up with that kind of reading experience and also assign work um in a way that we expect sort of um students who are serious about academics to do deep long readings. >> Yeah. I mean, I think I am in that period of my generation that's a transition between everyone who grew up reading book books and everyone who's growing up reading articles and things like that. But as I was saying earlier, I think it's a lot harder to track like the amount that you're doing reading for when it's digital and in these different sort of short form. But I think that there is something different about like reading a book or doing readings for a class or at least uh in mindset at least that makes it seem like more serious reading versus news articles. Um for example, I find that whenever those end up in a syllabus, I read them first. Like when I have like a list of things that I have to read, I will always read the short thing first, the shortest one first. Um because it makes me feel like I've gotten more done cuz it's, you know, there's three bullet points and one of them is three pages and one of them is 20 pages. At least I still finished one of the three bullet points. >> I think you're also pointing out one way in which reading for uh and preparing a reading for college is different than high school which is you rather than trying to cover the entire work, right? I remember sitting in say my um my junior year English class where we would read a short story or we'd read an essay and the the teacher would really make an effort to make sure that we had read the whole thing and that we had understood the whole thing. Whereas in college um you could spend you know half of a seminar talking about two pages of a novel right or if you're in a social sciences like be you know taking that time on just one journal article and just just half of that journal article right um so the expectation kind of is that you are familiar with the whole it doesn't even mean that you have to read the whole thing like very closely and slowly but that you're familiar with the whole but that you get enough out of your reading so that you have a contribution to make in the class discussion or with the you know or to be able to connect it to the lecture >> and I mean that just like seems to make sense for the fact that you want to get things out of your classes and out of the homework that you do. So, I think it's a it's a good motivation that way in just inherently where you're doing the reading and it's like, okay, there's hundreds of pages. I don't want to do all of that, but I do want to get something out of it or I don't even have time to do all of it. It may not even be that you don't want to, but you just physically cannot. It's a matter of, okay, well, all your professor wants and all you really should want is to get something out of the reading. And if as long as that's achieved, then like you've done your your job with the reading. >> Yeah. And as you'll see, like having that attitude towards the reading as being the basis of the conversation or as contributing to the lecture um changes what you do with the reading, right? Um, and I I I wish I had learned this earlier in my college career because I think um often in in um high school you're taught like you start at the beginning and you read all the way through the end and then you're done with your reading. >> Yep. >> Yeah. And and then you wait until you go to class the next day and then the teacher sort of you spend a lot of time in class like rereading. Do you know what I mean? um and pointing out what they think is important and then and then finally you get to talk whereas like the way that college classes are organized especially seminars the faculty member may come in and do a little bit of explanation of hey I'd like to talk about X today and here's the question I'm thinking of or may even start with um you know student questions. It's a really common practice for faculty members to ask students to submit questions for discussion, you know, on the learning management system the night before. >> But like even question even comments or reflections on the reading of I did not understand that um is like perfectly valid and like a good response to bring to the table because you could also talk about maybe why you didn't understand it. >> Yeah. And actually just from the the faculty members perspective, we are most interested in the things that our students think are most difficult. Right? So even be able to for someone to come in and say here's a part of this essay or this article or this poem that I didn't understand. That's a cue to me as the faculty member of oh maybe we should talk about this more, you know, in more detail and have a really productive conversation about it. So Nyx, where do you you yourself or where have you seen peers experience challenge in reading for college and sort of how how have you and your peers dealt with those challenges? >> Yeah. Um I would say there are two big problems in terms of reading. One is when someone has to read an entire book and that feels very very daunting um because it's the entirety of a book that you have to read. um or when there's like no like little to no interest in the reading material itself. Um I have ADHD. A lot of my friends have ADHD. So interest like is very important in wanting to do things and them actually getting done. So sometimes when readings are really really which is this is a common experience people who do not have ADHD wanting to do readings that you don't want to do um is inherently that doesn't work. You don't want to do readings that you don't want to do. Um, so that is tends to be a really like difficult thing, but and this is where skimming comes into play, finding parts of things that you're interested in even when you didn't think that you might be. Um, there's a really recent example of one of my classes where there was this reading, it was one of these intense philosophy texts where like the first couple words sounds insane. Like the first couple sentences you're just like, what am I about to read? But actually, the rest of it was extremely interesting. But I was turned off by the first three sentences. But then when we got into the discussion in class, I was like, I really wish I had read this because this is actually really good. It connects to a lot of different things that I already been thinking about. So maybe even like doing outside research, finding manageable information about whatever the book is on to gain interest and then maybe what are the what are the chapters in the book that are related to that that you can start looking at to build information for the paper. Um I'm a huge believer in like if you can't do all of it, try to do some of it. Um, especially when it comes to reading, especially when you have hundreds and hundreds of pages to do. If you're a history major, for example, like that is so much reading and it's not necessarily the fun kind. Like, yeah. But one of the things you're talking about is like, and I think this applies to what it's like to to be a college student. Like sometimes you have to manufacture your own interest in something in order to rise to the challenge that's being offered by your faculty member when they assign that work. Keep in mind faculty are in general really deliberate about what they're choosing. There is a reason why they've assigned that book or that article or that set of poems. um and um and if you don't engage at all with them, then you're going to be missing a significant part of what that faculty member is trying to teach you. And so part of of the of the method of trying to um to succeed in in college classes is to try to find ways of manufacturing that interest in whatever you happen to be reading. Um, and there's a bunch of different ways you can do that, you know. Um, ones that come to the top of my head is to just go back to the syllabus and remind yourself like, why is it that I'm taking the class in the first place? What am I really trying to get out of this class? And even if this seems like the mo most boring, dry, incomprehensible philosophy or, [laughter] you know, you know, history reading or, you know, scientific paper, there's got to be a reason why it's here, right? And if I can figure out what that reason is, then that's going to motivate me to to to engage in the work, >> right? >> Yeah. >> And it doesn't even need to be like equal engagement with everything. like if there are things that you're super duper interested in, definitely engage with them more. Give them more time because the at the end of the day, it's about what you're going to get out of it. Um like in terms of how you're going to get graded in the class, you want to get things out of your readings in order to like do well in papers and do well in the class discussion, but also like you want to get takeaways out of the class for yourself generally. So if you're super interested in something, do those deep dives. And if you're not interested in something and you only get a couple takeaways out of it, at least have a couple. so you can understand where your professor is coming from in assigning it because usually they tend to have cooked up some sort of connection with that and some of the things that you're interested in that you haven't seen yet. And I think it's like a cool little game to figure out why did they put this on the syllabus? Why is it important to them? Why is it important to the larger discussion? And that's I mean that's another thing that is um really big um at the college level is that we're so much more I mean yes we can read things that are about giving us information but so much more often we're reading to try to figure out what is this person saying what is this person arguing um what is this person's hypothesis and why is it important and so asking these questions about relevance why is it important how does the the does the exam example that someone gives actually prove the point that they're trying to make. Um, and sometimes you're going to you're going to be reading these other people who are supposed to be experts in their field and you're like, "Ah, yeah, I don't buy it." And that's exciting, [laughter] right? Because I think that's the other ways in which reading is incredibly egalitarian and and democratic. Um, and that's also a shift for many students from high school to college, which is that idea of um you and and and this is uncomfortable for some students, right? Like you think, okay, this person has a PhD often or is like top in their field and they're writing about something they're expert in. Who am who am I as an 18-year-old or you know or as somebody who is coming back to school and have hasn't read anything in this field ever before. Who am I to like critique this? But that's exactly what your what your professors want you to do because um they don't necessarily hold up the reading as the as the absolute last word or the most excellent ideas in the world just because this is the first time you as a unique person is reading this text, right? and your unique experiences, all of the reading and um uh life experience that you've had before, all the movies you've watched, that shaped who you are. You have a unique vision. And so um being able to to read a text for the first time and have something to say about it and to say, "Hey, here's where I'm not convinced." often you're not convinced because it doesn't connect with either the previous knowledge you have or the previous experience you have. Sometimes through that discussion you have about a place where someone makes an argument and you're not convinced. Maybe through discussion with your um peers, you do become convinced and you change a little bit. But sometimes you convince your peers, right? Like hey, you know, maybe we should be thinking about this in a different way. And that's that's exciting too. either one of those outcomes is the core of the kind of education you're getting in your classes. And it's just I'm I love that part of of of teaching and learning. [laughter] So, for the workshops that we do with students through our office of educational opportunity, um we um talk about sort of like a three-step strategy for approaching any reading that should help you get what you need out of that reading. Um the first step is doing some pre-ereading. The second step is active reading. And then the third step is um reflection and asking questions. Um do you use any pre-ereading strategies? And if so, what are those strategies? >> Doing pre-ereading by looking them up before coming to class is really important. Um and you don't know exactly who those people are going to be without figuring out what exactly are the films you're going to be seeing the next day. Where are they from from what time period? what's going on in the country at that time. So, all of those kinds of questions that you can do research on beforehand. >> I think another thing that I end up talking with students about a lot is um using pre-ereading to figure out what they should pay attention to while they're reading. Like I think in high school um for good reasons. Um the the teachers are saying, "Okay, just don't don't look up anything. Just experience the the work." which actually, you know, when you're reading a creative work, that that is good advice. But when you're trying to get information or concepts or like a sort of broader understanding out of the reading, sometimes you're going to need some again like some anchors, which I've talked about in some previous modules, like what are the anchors of the text? If you look them up, you find out information about them. you find out information about the methodology that they used for this book, which was actually a really sort of innovative methodology that they're using. Um, and you also get to a sense of like what are those key ideas that you really should be looking for as you're reading the book. Um, and sometimes having that like, oh, I need to pay attention to this term or when they come explain this example, I really should slow down and look at this example because these are things that other people have looked at. And I also think in terms of like doing these readings and other things you could be looking for in pre-ereading, um, well, part of pre-ereading is also just like scanning the text and looking for like what are the different organizers of this text? like in terms of like scientific journals, this is really important um because they they have a clear abstract, they have a clear conclusion and those are things that you can jump to to sort of figure out, okay, what is this journal article about? So you don't get bogged down in the weeds of a bunch of different a bunch of different data points that you may not fully understand or a bunch of different graphs you don't fully understand. And I think it's really important that we also say that the pre-ereading should take very little time. It's like five minutes, 10 minutes. It doesn't have to take a lot of students time, but you will be amazed that if you take the time just to put into a search engine the title of the work and the the author or authors of the work and see what pops up and spend five minutes reading, you will have such a more specific orientation to um the text and have some opportunity to read with purpose because I think that's the other thing that you know when you uh you were talking earlier about like sometimes you have tax and they're boring or you don't know why you're reading them but if you come in and with already a goal of okay these are the things that I need to understand from the text so that when you've been reading for half an hour and you start to drift off you have like that little list of okay these are the things I'm looking for and you it kind of can be I don't know if it could be fun but like it becomes a challenge for you like you're challenging yourself okay I need to understand these three concepts and as long as I understand these three concepts, I've I've quote unquote done the reading, right? Because that's what you're supposed to be getting out of it, even if there are some things that you have skipped over. Tell me a little bit about what you think active reading is, how you might define it to another student, and then sort of what are your active reading practices? Um, just like active reading for me is putting in the the slight amount of extra effort to go back and and reread things you don't understand, to take notes, to highlight things that you think are um are really just impactful. Like maybe you don't understand what it means, but you're like, "This sounds really smart and is probably important to the text. Doing that kind of work, I would consider active." Um, in terms of poetry, uh, I think active reading means like sitting with a line and really trying to unpack it with like journal articles and more scientific things. I think active reading is really trying to maybe parse out like what are what is happening in this graph? Like what is this what is this data saying and how does this reflect the conclusion? trying to think critically and maybe even critique the work itself is definitely active reading versus just like passively going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." I had been taught in high school that act that active reading was reading with a pen in your hand or a highlighter in your hand and I was like highlighting every single paragraph. And I I see that in in especially in my first year students today and you know you think you have interacted with the text when you do that because like oh I think this is important but then everything's either suddenly becomes important or the opposite happens. You have that highlighter in your hand and you're not highlighting anything. You're you're you're just kind of passively reading and nothing is connecting with you. And I think what's great about your description of active reading is that it's really about having a conversation with the text while you're reading. I don't understand what this means. Oh, this is a really interesting point. So, it it can start with reactions to the text. Like your professor said, okay, like give me your hot take. You can do as you're reading, you can have some t hot takes, right? Put little notes like what does this mean? you know, um, some people put smiley faces and frowny faces and stars and question marks, right? Um, but then also to do a little bit more than that, which is to to ask to actually write down what some of those questions are. Um, one of the things we'll talk about, um, when we get to do our demo is the, um, you know, if you go through this process, especially if you have a long reading, you might want to stop your reading every 15, 20 minutes or so and say, okay, what did I just read? Let me summarize this. Can I say, can I identify what this person's argument is? What are the uses of this idea? And what are the limits of this idea? And you always have to talk about both, right? And sometimes it requires having a unique perspective in order to identify either of those categories, right? Like, you know, I may be very different than the person who wrote this text, but I can see the ways in which these ideas are useful or I have a different experience than the person who wrote this text. And that shows me some of the limitations. I think sometimes students feel like skimming is cheating, but it's not. Like, tell me about how you skim tax and what you get out of the text when you skim. So, I have had to read some texts that are quite literally breaking down how to bake a ceramic, like how to fire a ceramic, and it's just a lot of technical terms that I don't need to know cuz it's not the class was not making ceramics. Class was just about like materiality. Um, so I don't need to know all that information. I know for the class on the basis of what the class is about that I don't need to know all of that information. I know what I'm going to be tested on later, so I know I don't need to know that specific information. That's something I'm definitely going to skim over. Um, I know people read left to right, especially when they're reading in English versus other languages, but sometimes I I find it really helpful to jump to the end of a line. Um, and then look look at it from right to left and then read it from left to right because then my brain will automatically pick up on the words that I've already read. Um, and it'll it'll be a lot easier to recognize them and process it because I've already seen the the letters on the screen before. Um, so like that initial like scan through of just like looking at the like the shape of the words on the screen is skimming. I'm not getting a ton out of it. Um, but I can see the key words and know where to go back and be like, "Okay, this is a point where I really want to read exactly what this says." Basically, as faculty members, we want you to get something out of the reading. We don't expect you to get everything out of the reading. So far we've talked about pre-ereading, we've talked about active reading, and then sort of the last step is sort of processing what you've read after you've read it. And um often you are doing final projects or writing, you know, exam papers about the readings that you've done over the semester. And so like it even to just sit and write down like a a three or four sentence summary of what you just read, it helps you process it in the moment. It helps prepare you for class. And if you keep track of those those um uh if you keep track of those entries, that's part of your studying for your final exams or or it could be the seed that you're writing for your final paper for that that semester. So, are there any things that you do, Nyx, while you like after you've read something to help you process it? Maybe before you step into the classroom or even after you've read it, then you've had your class and then you want to process it some more. >> I think community processing is a really important thing for me. So, whether that be a discussion post, I I never write a discussion post before I've read everyone else's. is I know that people don't read other people's discussion posts, which I find bizarre. Um because I don't know what to say without seeing what other people said about something. I I don't know why, but I cannot come up with my own ideas without having seen what other people said about the same thing that we just read. Um so that's a really important space for me. But whenever it's like there's no discussion post or there's no like online form, I love talking to my friends about what I'm reading. Um and even if they're busy, they tend to like be interested in the things I have to say and vice versa. I love to hear about what my friends are reading and doing research on. I think it's fascinating um because they're getting opportunities I won't like they're taking classes I may not be able to take and vice versa. So, I really like hearing about it. Um yeah, I think that's the primary way that I do I do post reading reflection is really just by engaging with people about what I'm reading. Um or even synthesizing things after class into like a project or something like that. I love um like I I do a lot of creative projects um throughout my semesters and so I'll tend to pull maybe even quotes specifically from readings that I've done into like projects that I'm doing or I'll write them down somewhere with the intention of using that idea for something else later. Um so I I really love uh going back and reviewing quotes that I've highlighted and things like that. Um, and I find myself doing that a lot, especially with like the manifestos from my radical cinemas class. A lot of those like one like those sentences are really powerful and really impactful. Um, and I'm using them to like be the beginning of like my poetry chap for example. So even synthesizing those things into creative projects that might be completely unrelated to the class can be a really good way to engage in post reading. Part of it is to take some time to know and learn what works best for you. I have students who I I was actually just talking to another student um a a couple hours ago where he was describing having noise cancelling headphones and being all alone and that is the only and then having going through and doing reading for like 3 hours at a time. I'm like, if that works for you, God bless you. I cannot Well, I can do that with novels, but I can only do that with novels, right? I need to go to a coffee shop. I need to have that ambient noise around me. I need to have my cup of tea, and I just need to like that puts me in my zone. Um, I have other students who they can't read in those longer blocks. They can like they figure out by trial and error. um I can only read for half an hour at a time, 45 minutes at a time, and then I have to switch to something else because otherwise I'll just waste my time being distracted. One of the ways to make sure that you're getting your reading done is to assign a time and a place to it and to once you found the most comfortable environment for your reading, um, commit to doing the same like the the reading for the same class at the same time every time you can during the week, right? to create this routine because what will happen is that you'll actually trick your your body into getting into the reading for that class because you've established this pattern. Okay, at you know at 1:00 I'm going to go to this couch in the library to read for my English class. Um one other question I have for you is um um do you ever listen to texts rather than read them? So, this does not work with every kind of text. I hate doing this with poetry. If I had to listen to like AI, read me poetry. I can't do it. It makes me cry. Also, because it's a lot of poetry tends to be very visual, like the where the spacings are, what kind of um punctuation is being used, but other texts are just not that way. If I'm reading a textbook, um I love to use like text to speech. Um I thankfully with through Yale every student has access to this um platform called Kurszswe which does this like text to speech reading on a lot of different PDFs um including ones that might have horrible formatting. It still sometimes works which is really nice. Um text to speech is really really useful especially since this platform specifically will highlight the different words as they are being read. So you can actually visually track everything which is really good for me because sometimes I will read an entire paragraph and have no and but like I was not reading the paragraph especially that since I did debate in high school and was taught how to read without reading >> because when you have to speak very fast when reading something you have to turn your brain off from actually reading it. So this is really good because it really focuses focused me again on like actually processing the words and what are being said. I it's a really great tool. Um and I think it's something like even to invest in because not every institution has that kind of free access to something like that. Um but I know there are like a lot of different platforms on like the app store and things like that um that you can invest in which I would really recommend especially if it's ones that are like $4 or like a a really small monthly subscription. I think it's worth it especially to be able to like have your readings on your phone would be a game changer. >> Yeah. And the text to speech can be really helpful for a wide wide variety of students. Like I sometimes amum when I'm when I work with student athletes. They have such little time when they have a reading heavy course. It can be really difficult for them to do all the readings. And so um I'll say, well, can you can you get that book as an audio book? Um or can you use text to speech software and just listen to it while you're on the bus traveling to your next meet, right? Um, and it's also just like there are all of these assisted technologies out there that while they're designed, you know, were first inspired to support students who are neurode divergent or um have, you know, have dyslexia, for example, they can be helpful to people even without those um learning challenges. When you get your first college writing assignment, [music] you might think, is college writing just the five paragraph essay but longer? Can I just use chat GPT [music] to handle the grammar and structure so I can meet that deadline? Those questions and fears are natural. You're transitioning from high school where writing was often about quick demonstrations [music] of comprehension with little opportunity for revision. In college, we are now [music] asking you to engage with and critique other scholars ideas, ask questions, and ultimately build new knowledge. To navigate the shift, you need a different process. I want you to hear from Nyx, a student who has mastered [music] this transition. Nyx realized that the most crucial stage isn't the writing itself, but the thinking by allocating time for critical [music] analysis, the intellectual architecture of your argument. You will develop a voice and you will find the vehicle to communicate thoughts you are genuinely [music] proud of. So, this conversation that we're going to have about writing today is really about how do you transition into writing for college? and um how can you develop that voice, develop those strategies that will help you best engage with the kinds of questions that you're being asked to respond to in college? So, I'm just going to start off with what was writing like for you before you went to to college? Like what was it like in high school? How would you describe it? So writing for me really started in middle school because I went to an international baloria middle school and then I went to an APge geared high school. And the difference was very aggressively felt because in my IB middle school writing was a lot more like creating like we had essays but some of but like a lot of our projects were for example rewriting the end of Lord of the Flies or like writing poetry and it was a lot more similar to what you do in college um or at least at least what I do in college. I'm a humanities major. So, of course, I'm writing poetry and like engaging with literature in that way instead of just writing analysis essays. But then in high school, things like aggressively shifted. Writing was a lot more timed. It was done in 45 minutes in your class period. And there was usually no option for revision. I mean, first of all, it was hard enough to read your handwriting, let alone go back and like edit what you were doing. Um, but yeah, there wasn't any focus on revision or like creation at all. It was more about like writing as the act of writing instead of writing as the act of creating something that you're proud of. I would say, >> you know, one of the things that you do and you that that's a little different than in high school. In high school, you often were writing to explain. >> With high school writing, a lot of it is summary. They're just trying to prove that you know what you're talking about, that you I mean went to class, that you did the readings kind of and you know what you're talking about. And so I've had experiences with high school professors where like if I didn't write about the things that they talked about in class and things they really wanted us to write about, then I would get a worse grade because it wasn't exactly the same thing. >> How do you see college the purpose of college writing as being maybe a little different than what you saw it as in high school? >> Yeah, I think like I was saying before, there's been this like return to how I saw writing when I was in middle school, which is about creating something. the majority of my classes, like our final project is I were able to do a creative project. This is not true for every major. Um, but because I'm a humanities major, I choose I also tend to choose classes that have this option because for me, writing is just just as much about getting my audience to understand what I'm saying as it is for me to get out what I'm saying. Me to have a vehicle to communicate my thoughts, um, and just like create something that I'm proud of. There's no just one way to write. Writing a lab report in a STEM class is very different than writing um a creative paper for a humanities class, which is very different than writing an analytical paper for a pol political science class, right? And so one of the big challenges for writing at the university level is um one figuring out how to develop your voice but also develop your voice in all of these different genres of writing. >> I have experimented with so many different kinds of genres at Yale because I've taken education studies classes which take that more political science analytical paper sociology framework of a like literature review. I've also written like museum labels. I've like written poetry. I've written analysis of poetry. I've written history of art analysis paper which is somehow completely different than an a poetry analysis paper somehow entirely different which I was not expecting. It's really a matter of like reckoning with what is the genre, what is the purpose of the genre, and also what do you want to say about whatever it is you're working with. The two things that a lot of writers have to do when they're approaching writing in a class for the first time is to ask first of all what are my ideas about this topic? what is it that I want to say meaning the student and second what what are the expectations of the audience or what are the expectations in the field about how this knowledge gets made and presented right so it's a combination between understanding what you're learning and being able to show what you've learned and how you're contributing to furthering the knowledge in this particular field and how you can meet the expectations of that field in terms of how you you know like what kinds of evidence that you cite and then how you interpret the evidence. >> But that is localized to particular fields. It just depends on what you're doing and like what your purpose is. If your purpose is to write and get out the words that you feel are really important and you you can use normal essays to have that space as well, you can use conclusions of like even like the most academic papers to have that space. Um, but if your emphasis is more so like I really want my audience to understand XYZ in plain language, then that's how you'll approach the text. >> You know, one of the things that you do and you that that's a little different than in high school. In high school, you often were writing to explain. And that fits for high school because in high school they just like the the main work of high school is to to to understand, to comprehend, and then to show your comprehension. Whereas the extra layer that's happening in college is that you are critically analyzing and you're responding and building new law knowledge in relationship to that. So, you know, taking a um you know, writing an essay about utilitarianism, you know, the the um making sure that policies have um the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It's an oversimplification of it, but we'll go with it. um the um you know the students might be writing an essay where they both explain what utilitarianism is use some quotes from John Stewart Mill who's one of the um great philosophers of utilitarianism and but then there might be something that they're quoting from Mill that they have a question about you know what this idea doesn't really fly you know and it doesn't really make sense or or it doesn't fit in with all the other things that Mill is saying or it doesn't fit in what his other colleagues are saying. The job of the writer in the at the university level is to point out these discrepancies to ask questions about the ideas and then use their own examples or examples from other sources to try to illustrate why we might need to think differently about something that we've thought one way about for years and years and years. Um, and that feels a little risky, I think, for a lot of students. But at the college level, professors are more interested in seeing not just what you think, but how you formulate that thought, right? And how you formulate the thought is what makes an argument persuasive or what makes a strong essay. Um, that and what evidence you can provide that demonstrates that idea. Um and and so it kind of ups the challenge of writing quite a bit when you are trying to not only say, "Oh, I understand this idea, but I actually have questions about it and I want to think differently about it." I really think that's kind of the quintessence of the college experience is getting to like sit with these books and question them and think in new ways about them. Um I and like on the point of how you formulate your arguments, I have fully turned in papers that I've gotten A's on where it's riddled with typos. Riddled with typos. But the concept behind it and the organization of the ideas, I had spent hours thinking through even if it wasn't on the page, I'd spend hours sitting there going, "How does X connect to Y? And how can I make a thesis that like does this correctly?" And so that is for like my professor who I know very well. It's also why I can turn in my my papers with a million typos. Um, is like he's looking at that part. He's looking at that connection of ideas more so than he's looking at did I spend an extra two hours going through making sure all the commas were nice, making sure that I didn't misspell any words. But like I spent, he can tell that I spent three hours trying to get from the poem to an argument. Um, and also finding evidence and making it into some sort of structural piece. Can you describe a little bit about like like if your ideal timeline? I don't know. I know we don't always get to do it, but like say from the day you get your your assignment like how long does it really take you and how do you spend your time preparing and writing that paper? I have spent days with a blank page and a poem that I've picked out and just desperately analyzing it trying to figure out what like how I can get my ideas into a full-length paper because one thing is about like especially with the po the medium I work with the most poetry you can have a small idea but making it a bigger one that connects to other things is the difficult part. Like you can have like moments of clarity but that doesn't mean that you have an argument. Um, so I will typically spend a very long time I will first pick what I'm talking about so I have something to analyze and something to think about and then I will spend at least two, three, four days analyzing it, thinking about it, trying to make connections. I do the same with my discussion post where I'll let myself sit with my reading for a while before I write because even if I have three hours and I can write the most beautiful discussion post ever, I would much rather sit for two of those hours and then write for one of them instead. Um, and that's typically why with my papers, they're they're turned in without that last stage because I've spent so long on that first stage of getting a good argument instead of sort of saying, "Okay, well, I need to get this paper done and then just writing." >> Do you talk to other people about your during that justation stage? >> Oh, absolutely. Oh, absolutely. I can't stop talk I can't stop talking about it. I will be like, "Okay, this is what I'm going to write for my paper and then blah blah blah blah blah." And then I gauge also how people react to it, you know? Like I can tell when people are like, "What? You sound crazy." And then I can also tell people are like, "Wait, you're kind of cooking with that." So talking to people is definitely really really important. So yeah, I like most of my writing process is not writing. It's blank page. And then I end up writing and that's why sometimes I have typos and a million typos is obviously an exaggeration. Like to I just think typically when people think about a high like a college paper, they imagine no typos. They imagine it's been like perfectly gone through every single line, which is maybe what your creative writing professor wants. It's definitely what your creative writing professor wants. But in terms of like an analytical paper, they're a lot much more looking for the ideas and there's a little bit of grace with the writing. And so I tend to focus on the important part, which is the ideas instead. And that's where drafting becomes so so important. Do you you know you've talked about having to sit and think and then write. Um and one of the challenges making enough time for that process to play out over time, right? And for some folks um you know there's a you know a couple days of thinking and then there's writing but the writing isn't beautiful. The writing is okay. It comes out in little fits and starts. Sometimes it comes out in f full sentences. Sometimes it comes out in bullet points. But I'm going to try to just sit and get all my ideas out first. Making all those decisions that takes time and it takes multiple sessions of writing at the computer. It also takes talking out your ideas with other people. Right? So not only the faculty member but many many universities have um writing tutoring or writing centers where you can go and show your writing to another peer or discuss your writing with another peer get feedback in the me in the middle of it so that you can start to focus and narrow and write a much more polished essay. Um, and so one of the things I very very highly recommend is embedding talking to other people and in particular talking to writing centers or writing tutors, especially because often at universities they are free, right? You can just go make an appointment. Um, and that step is a step that people are often missing. Like I often suggest to students, especially ones who struggle with with writing and getting everything out on the page, is all right, sit down, make as many notes as you possibly can, it doesn't have to be perfect, and then go meet with your writing partner or your writing tutor and talk with them. Okay, here's the ideas that I have. And if you you struggle with with structuring them, they can ask you questions to help you figure out how to structure it. and then you're off and running again and filling in all the gaps that you've that you've lost. Um, and so making sure that you are making time every day to do some work without the expectation that you will finish a paper in like four hours. That just doesn't happen at the college level or at least happens very rarely only if it's like a one-page paper, right? If >> we went through my Google editing history for every single sentence, it would be like insane the amount of time that I spent especially on an introduction paragraph. the amount of time I spend writing that is just so much. And then everything else after that is a lot faster. Once I get the introduction done and I figure out how things can be structured, I can write everything else. But that's the thing I have a million drafts of is the introduction because there's no point in writing the rest of the paper if I don't have that done. If I don't have the structure figured out, why would I waste my time writing the rest of the paper? Part of taking one of those intro writing classes, I urge you not to skip it. If you have an opportunity to take that at your college, you should take it is because it helps you develop the writing process that works for you and the [snorts] way your brain works, right? Because everybody there is no one writing process that works for everyone. So, something that I really would love to talk with you about is about how we use AI um in our writing. And of course, whatever we may be saying at this moment in time because AI is changing so quickly um may not be as relevant. But I think it's worth it because AI is here to stay. People often think of AI is of course artificial intelligence, but I also tend to think of the A and the AI as assistive, right? That it's almost as if AI can be your assistant in getting your work completed. um and to help you with your work. Um but the the AI as an assistant shouldn't be doing the work for you. >> Typically I the only reason I've used AI in writing is for that like editing process. I think that there are certain things the AI is better at understanding and grappling with than others. I think grammatical rules is one of those things. And it can be like this comma should go here. And I'm like thank you AI. that was really helpful. Um, I think that's also like relevant for things like Grammarly where AI is now embedded into Grammarly. I don't know how they were doing it before to be honest. Um, really confused about that. But like now it's embedded into Grammarly. So when you're using Grammarly, technically that is also using AI. Um, but again that's for the editing purposes. Grammarly is not going to write your paper for you. I also think the a the A in AI is interesting because it's pulling from already created human documents. like these are already like it's a collage really of anything it's ever been inputed. So it's not really producing anything as much as giving you an amalgamation of stuff others have produced which is another reason why you we shouldn't write for you because it's not really it's words. It's not some sort of abstract like object that's creating something for you. It's taking from others and com like putting them together which is why we consider like AI usage plagiarism for that. I think it should be for that reason among other reasons um is because all of its words come from other people too. Yeah. And another way I've talked about this mostly with colleagues but sometimes with students is to ask the question of when you're using AI where is your learning happening right um and I think that the um the use case that you described that I've actually told students when they have a lot of material or they're just struggling with the material a little bit the material that they're reading of like asking for AI to produce a summary of the points or you know even to take like I've known people who have taken their class notes and fed that into AI just to see what are the themes that are happening. So, so again it in its kind of assistive mode of okay here it's it's helping you recognize patterns maybe or bring things to the surface that you kind of maybe knew in the back of your mind but until AI sort of says like oh like here's a theme that keeps coming up over and over again you're like oh maybe that's a theme I can explore because as I've described before the writing and thinking process are so closely intertwined right you know for so many students they think they're they start a paragraph and think it's going to go one way and then they start writing and they start analyzing the text and then they're like, "Oh, my conclusion is just a little bit different, but it's a different conclusion, right?" So, the learning is happening in the process of actually putting the words to the page. That's the benefit for for the student. Um, and as you're saying, what's missing out of when you have generative AI sort of producing a text for you, what's missing is you, right? like what what's missing is the the secret sauce of like what your ideas are and that for me as a faculty member that's also what I'm anticipating. I want to see how you know Nyx approaches this poem which is different than the way that Belinda is going to approach this pro this poem. Right? So, Nyx, if you had a high school student come up to you, you know, who's used to doing summaries for their classes using chat GBT, like what would you advise them about using chat GBT in college? Well, first I would ask them if Chip knows how they think or what their ideas are or what their experiences are and then have a conversation about values because I think the problem with and the urge to use like AI comes from not valuing yourself and your own ideas and comes from wanting to produce a product for someone else to consume and you want to shift the production onto AI instead of having yourself be the one who's doing the producing. But if you value your own ideas and the way that you say things or even just like your own experiences, if you don't think that you like if you don't think that you have a way with words, but you value where you've been and you feel like you have a lot of there's a lot of strength in that, then valuing that is like I think the first step in avoiding AI because AI cannot write the way that you do and you'll immediately know when you ask it to write a paragraph that it's not going to come up with the same conclusions that you did because also it's writing in front again in like amalgamation of different people and they're not you. So the truth is that STEM courses in college are [music] very different than STEM courses in high school. The pace of the courses and the expectations for homework and exams are also different. It can take some time for many students [music] to adjust to these differences. In this module, you will learn how to tackle complex problem sets, participate in labs, read scientific papers, and prepare for exams. That's why I've [music] asked Carly, a biomedical engineering student, to join us. Carly mastered the art of breaking down challenging work into manageable steps. My hope is that you will learn how to use the time [music] you're given and keep your passion for the material alive. One of the things I always like to to ask students when they come to me and they say, "Hey, you know, Dr. Gosling, I'm struggling with something um academic." I always ask, "So, what do you feel like your strengths are in this area?" And so in terms of working you know um being a student in um biomedical engineering when you came into college what did you feel like your strengths were? >> Yeah um I went to an IV school um an international balora program school in high school um and I had always been like kind of STEM focused in um my school career up until that point. Um, and so part of the IB program is choosing like what classes that you want to take um to set you up for college. And um I chose to take bio and biology and chemistry um in that during high school during for that program. Um and I think the content that I learned in high school was actually not super um not a lot of it translated over to the content that I was learning in college. Um, and so it wasn't the content itself that um I think set me up, but rather learning how to learn those concepts in those classes that set me up better. Students come do come in with with strengths. And it's partly it's figuring out like how to use those strengths and build upon them rather than than I think I I often see students who are like I'm overwhelmed by by the pace of a course by all of the new information and especially if you're if you're used to memorizing and then you're you know confronted with a 60 slide deck right and you're like oh my goodness I have to memorize all this. No, you actually you don't have to memorize. You have to familiarize yourself with all of it. As I started at the beginning, you know, saying that one of the biggest myths about um any kind of learning is that you have to be naturally good at it in order to do well. And it's just not the case. It really is about having that exposure, getting that support, learning new ways of approaching a topic. But as long as everyone kind of keeps working at it, it really is possible to thrive. Like what were some of the challenges that you faced when you first were taking um STEM courses at the college level? It was a little scary like going into um my intro bio and chem classes thinking that I was like h I have like this background from high school and then I like was shocked when I was like oh I actually I' like heard some of these words before but I don't I still don't really know how to do all >> what do you think that difference was like there's just a a difference in degree of detail or >> I think it's a a bunch of different factors like some of them were just like my bio classes were focused on um like more broad like macro level biology things. So like um with related to like systems um and whereas like the classes that I was taking were much more like microlevel like um microlevel biology. Um so inside cells and inside bodies whereas it was before it was more like talking about like how different animals and like systems interact with each other. um and then you receiving all the content and um that class time doesn't involve you doing the work. Whereas in a lot of high school classes, you get you get to learn some of the content and then you get to do the work like right away. Whereas you need to in college you need to find the time to do the work and um and make sure you understand it by yourself outside of class time. Um, and I think that was one thing that I think that was honestly something that I didn't really like realize was playing a big role until later in in my college career because um I think in high school I was just like most of my homework would be done like in class and then like I would just study for the exams when they came and um like at home the one or two nights before whereas in college like you really need to you need to study as you go. It's kind I mean it's the same thing that happened like maybe when you were doing the work in class in high school. Um it's kind of the same form of like studying as you go but that was kind of more built into the class whereas like this is much more proactive and you need to take the steps um to make sure you facilitate your own learning. Um, in my experience with working with students, there are a couple of places where students tend to have more struggles than other places within sort of STEM coursework. And one of the very first ones is doing reading for STEM, right? Because I think one of the challenges is yet like many courses still use textbooks or you know have online textbooks that that they have students refer to. Sometimes they're having students read um actual um scientific papers that get published in scientific journals by professors. Um but then there's also other kinds of reading like entire data sets, you know, that that you might be using in a project. Um, and I think for students, you know, largely I, you know, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but largely there's still kind of when you're reading for STEM in high school, it tends to be you have a textbook and you read the textbook and then you have a lecture and you do activities around the theme in the textbook. How is reading different in college first of all and then what are some ways you learn to like manage and negotiate that different kind of reading that you have in the college level? >> Yeah, I think one thing about a lot of scientific reading like a lot of I think like across the STEM discipline in general is that it has they're pretty like set rules for what goes into like a scientific paper. Um, and so generally if you can understand the structure of a scientific paper and what each section is meant to do, um, and meant to provide the reader, then, um, then you have a lot easier time going through these papers that might be really long, um, and use a lot of words that you might not fully understand in that moment. Um and so generally papers, scientific papers in journals will start with after the title will start with an abstract um and then lead into the background um and then go into the methods and and then give you the the data um that they collected and then the analysis of the data and then final conclusions. Um and one thing about um scientific papers is that they don't include any there's no like show show don't tell as is like very important in um like English disciplines where but this is just tell like all all of the scientific articles are just tell and so I think that's one thing is that um every sentence in there is meant to serve like a very specific purpose it's meant to just give you the information directly. Um, and so starting from the beginning of the paper, the abstract will just give you a very quick overview of what the article is about. Generally, they'll have a couple sentences on like what they found, um, and like where what what that's like important for. Um, and so this section is really good for if you're doing like a literature review, um, for example, on a topic, which is basically just finding all of the kind of information that's out there on a specific topic. And so skimming through you honestly like the abstract you can just read the whole thing because it it's only like a paragraph um and being able to um if you're doing something that is more like high level trying to look at um what is the broad overall overarching knowledge um of this field the abstract is a really good place to just read and kind of get a better understanding of what might be included in this article and see if it's important for you to spend your time on And afterwards they'll go into the methods. So this part is um really important if you are it's basically the method the point of the methods section is to provide the reader the ability to recreate the experiment if they wanted to. So um it is generally very straightforward um and it's very much exactly just what um the experimenters were doing with scientific papers. um graphs and figures have very specific rules that they need to follow. Um and so everything that's placed in a graph like has a meaning and it it serves a purpose. So a lot of times in a lot of college classes um if a professor is asking you to do a reading, this is probably the most important part um because it tells you exactly why it's important and why it's needed. Um most people are not reading every single word in the scientific paper. It's not a bad thing at all to not read every single word. Um, sometimes it's it's helpful to know every single word and know it like the back of your hand, but oftent times being able to just extrapolate the information that you need from a specific section um is much more valuable than reading the entire paper. Um, which can also be really overwhelming. So, no, I'm so glad you said that because I think that is one of the the big mistakes this that that students make when they're assigned a scientific paper is just they start at the beginning and read it to the end as if it was a novel. But really, you did such a great job of describing what that structure is and you're supposed to kind of dive into the pieces that are most relevant to what you're trying to do. >> Yeah. And a lot of times I think another big emphasis um that I mentioned a little bit earlier is when when the authors put like visuals inside of a paper that means that they're really trying to tell you something about like with that visual. Um because most of it is words and so if there is a visual that means it's really important. >> How do you think students need to think differently about the textbook? A lot of times the textbook is meant to supplement the content that um is being taught in lectures in college. Um and so one thing is I I honestly I don't think there's been a lot of cases there's been a handful of times where like I remember professors specifically referring to a textbook, but it definitely doesn't happen as often as it does um like in high school classes. And a lot of times these textbooks will go into that specific detail. And so if you're finding that you're struggling with a specific concept or if you need examples with this concept, um the textbook is a really good place to look for that because it goes much more in depth. How do you you know and often in in college these P sets are or problem sets are assigned, you know, maybe a week advance or even two weeks in advance of the due date. Um which again is very different than in high school when we tend to have um homework that is assigned for each night, right? or or each day that you have class if you have a block schedule for example. Um how like what are some of your top recommendations for how students can really effectively um work on these challenging pieetss and get them turned in on time. >> Yeah. I think the biggest thing and honestly my favorite thing about problem sets um if there is a favorite thing to be [laughter] excited about is that um you can break them down into so many different parts and I think that's one thing that I really enjoy um as compared to like writing a paper where I feel like it's just all like one thing u which is also not the case but um in problem sets I think being able to pick apart each of the problems separately um makes it much more digest festival. And that is um that is a really big um that's a technique that is really important in being able to not feel super overwhelmed by the problems. Um because most of the time there is a very um especially in like math and physics classes um there's a very straightforward um process that needs to be followed for you to get to the answer. And so, um, being able to figure out what exactly, um, what the question is asking for and then what you know exists, what the what information the problem is giving you and providing you and then what you need to figure out from that. Um, this is actually um this is a method that I was taught in high school actually. Um, it's called the guess method. G is like given. So it's like exactly what what has the problem what information has the problem given you and then U is unknown. So what are you looking for? And then E is equation. So what equation do you need that will use what you are given and um give you what is unknown. So generally you're finding an equation that has um variables that um include both the given and unknowns. Um and then I think S is substitution. So like plugging in everything that you know um and then the other s is solve. So maybe I do remember this [laughter] but it is I think that's a really helpful structure in um picking apart different piece sets. Um and even though I don't like walk through those five steps every single time I do a problem anymore. It's kind of just um the step from taking what you know and figuring out what you don't know to and then taking um other supplemental things. So usually the equations um to figure out and use all of that together to figure out the last thing that you are being asked to do. Um that was a beautiful description I have to say and what I love about having this methodology or having a methodology in mind which while you know that gas method that you just described isn't going to work even with every single kind of problem or every single discipline the the process that you outline just even having a process for how to approach a problem is super important because often if you just start at you know sort of start at the beginning of a problem and you just start working um it's inevitable that you're going to get to a place where you're stuck, right? Whereas um and then if you if you if you don't have a method for getting yourself unstuck, >> right? Then you you just are kind of spinning your wheels. And I think what I love about the method that you described and then how it kind of translates even more broadly to the to the to um the the coursework that you do in STEM is that it gives you an approach that you can take with any kind of sort of scientific research, right? You look at what do you know and then you look at what you don't know [laughter] and then you try to figure out what's the instrument that's going to allow you to figure out what you don't know. So say you are given a problem set one week before it's due. Can you walk me through that week and how you actually get the problem set done? Like what steps you take to get the problem set done within the amount of time you have of that week? Generally um you want if a if a professor has given you a certain amount of time to do something, you're probably going to need all of that time to do something. Um I think this is especially apparent when they give you more time. So when professors give you two week long problem sets, there's probably a reason why they're giving you two weeks to do that. So being able to take advantage of all the time that you're given um is a really it's a really difficult thing to do and also a really important thing to learn. Um and so generally by the thing your life will be busy and so um it's sometimes it can be difficult to follow this exact schedule. Um, but generally I think a good checkpoint is if you're halfway through the the length of time that you've been given to complete a problem set. You've done like you've at least looked at every question and you've tried to complete as much as you can. Um, so you've seen the entire problem set and like have tried to work through the entire set problem set by this point because that gives you another half of the time that you're given to ask for ask for help. um and figure out what questions that you have so that you can use the office hours and um the professor's help um in order to finish up the rest of the problem set with enough time to spare. And so, um, I like to a lot of times like my problem sets will if they're due in the middle of the week, then that means that weekend, um, I will be using that weekend to at least run through the entire problem set. And then that gives um a couple days where if there's a question that I that um you might have that you think is beneficial to the class and sometimes like someone will ask that to the whole class and um everyone and the professor will go over that together. Um, but more oftentimes there's um questions that you might have that come up while you're doing the problems and you can go to um the teaching assistants office hours. Um, and it's really difficult sometimes to not wait until the last minute, but it is like being able to take advantage of the resources and especially like the the teaching assistants are there to help you succeed. um and they want you to s succeed as well and they want to help you. Um and so being able to figure out what you don't know um is really helpful for um asking for help. Yeah, that that's great. And I I think um what's so helpful about what you were just saying is to acknowledge that the professors don't expect you to be able to do the entire problem set by yourself. The whole reason why there are office hours, why they might be peer tutors um that are assigned to the course um or you get to meet with your teaching assistant or your teaching fellow is because to do this work, you actually, as you said, need to know what you don't know. And once you know you know what you don't know, you then have to go and find it. And often it's these TAs, the office hours, the professors, the tutors that give you that resource. Exams are kind of just a gigantic problem set. And so, um, this is a lot easier said than done, but, um, I think parts of what I was mentioning, um, previously, which are, um, like going over the content soon after you are first, um, introduced to it, and then also, um, starting early. Um, both things that are much easier said than done, but um, being able to the content review that happens if you're doing it consistently. um after your classes and after you first heard the content will make the studying a lot easier. Um because a lot of times it will there will be like one or two midterms throughout the semester which means that you are usually taking a one-third or half of that class and being tested on all of that content in one exam. Um and so it's impossible to learn it all um the night before. um and being able to and often because these classes are also very um they build on the knowledge that you've learned before. Um being able to if you don't understand what is being told at the beginning, then you're going to have a hard time um building those things on top of that. And so if you're consistently reviewing the content that um is being shown to you, then you know um when you need to ask for more support um throughout the semester. Um and I think another thing is um when studying for exam um I I know one thing that really helps me is like writing out all of the concepts that will be tested on the exam. So going back to um the syllabus and um looking through what each of those main topics are and then identifying which ones you need the most um practice on is really key. Um and being able to see that um kind of visually. Sometimes professors will provide exactly like they'll give you an outline of what the concepts on um an exam will be tested on. Um but a lot of times you will have to figure out um exactly what you don't know. >> One thing um that I also um that that I hear about is the importance of showing your work and even if you don't ultimately get the right answer to the problem. Have you ever like can you tell me a little bit about your experience with that? >> Yes. Yes. Showing your work is so important. I think I've gotten so many partial points from just showing my work. Um, and that is one thing that is um, really important about I think a lot of these classes is it's not really about getting the right answer. It's about demonstrating that you know how to get to the right answer. Um and so even if you know um a lot of a lot of times professors will be um if a certain question is allocated a certain amount of points, they're looking for specific things that you've written down that will give you the full points. Um and so if you just magically write down the answer at the end, um there's no way of them knowing like you did all of the math in your head or you just like copied it off of someone who's sitting next to you. Um, and so they need to know in order for them to know that you understand it, they need to see the steps that are in between. Um, I'm always a believer in that like showing showing more is in fact better um in these cases because you never know um what they might be looking for. And then also there will be times where you come across an exam problem and you get halfway and you have no idea how to finish the problem. Um, and that's okay because showing like what you've known, a lot of professors will give that partial credit and the partial credit is better than no credit. I think one of the challenges I see with with some of my students, especially in their first their first year or then in their second year, there's like kind of like two, you know, for lack of a better term, like crisis points that um that newer college level STEM students have. One is when they enter an introductory course and um they feel overwhelmed and then they take their first um exam and they get a grade they've never seen before. Maybe they get their first C, maybe they get their first D. Um, now I, as somebody who's worked at the university for a long time, know that that that's really common and that students, you know, get that first grade because it's not because they're not meant to do STEM. It's because they're learning how to do STEM for the first time um, at the college level. And you're going to make mistakes. Like I think it's interesting some of the stuff that you were talking about. you said, "I didn't learn how to do this until the end of my sophomore year or the beginning of my junior year, right?" So, giving yourself like some grace and time to learn actually how to engage with the particular STEM topic I think is really important. Uh, you know, I sometimes get worried about some of my STEM students that are pushing themselves so hard to try to do well in every single part to the part to the point where it's almost counterproductive, right? Um, if you find yourself staying up late to study really hard to try to get the highest grade that you possibly can get, but then you find yourself burning out, not loving it anymore, like that that's of a concern. Maybe it's actually better for you to like try your best, but don't try to overdo it. Um, so that you still maintain that passion and that interest in the in the topic. And I also want to say just because you're good at STEM doesn't mean you have to do it. >> Yeah. I think rather than thinking am I good at this or am I bad at this which I think is it's a very fixed mindset to be thinking I'm good at X I'm bad at X. Um and instead like as you said if it's something you really care about just keep going towards it. And if it's something that even if you're good at it doesn't bring you you know as much joy or or excitement as other things then go you know go do that other thing. Um but if you you know I if you're a student who is you know both you know worried about being overwhelmed or worried about your grades and thinking oh is this field for me I think the first step is to a do a selfch check do I enjoy doing this work if I do if I still have curiosity if I still have passion um even if it's difficult now let me try to stick it stick through it and let me go ask and find resources and get guidance. But to to get some advice on that, too, because part of that, you know, like I wouldn't make any decision until you talk out what the possibilities are for you and what you think is is best for you. Um, but then ultimately, you know, that you might get a bunch of advice, but that decision is is yours. If you do encounter someone who's like, I don't think you're cut out for STEM, absolutely do not believe them, >> right? go talk to someone else who you can ask this question of or or tell your story to. Um often who might be like a a neutral person again like your dean doesn't really care about what you end up majoring in. They just want to make sure you're happy. Same thing with your adviserss. They don't really care. They just want you to be happy and satisfied and get the most out of your education. So find someone who's in that like neutral space sometimes even like an upper level student and and say here's what I still love about this. Here's where I'm struggling. Um what resources can I put to what where I'm struggling? Can I try that out for a little while? The biggest myth about college success is that the brightest students don't need to use resources outside of class to succeed. [music] Instead, it is often the most effective students who use the resources the most. We talked to Carly, a STEM major, who walks us through her experience and understanding of all of the types of campus resources. Your success in college is directly linked to your willingness to ask for help. My hope for you is that you [music] leave this module realizing that people want to help you. you have an entire campus waiting to back you up from the writing center peer tutor to the financial aid counselor. Take the first step and just ask. So, I'm going to start with the academic ones. Um, and the one that is both the most obvious and I wish students would use more is actually going and talking to their um faculty and teaching assistants during office hours. >> Yeah. So, um, out of all of the classes I've been to, I think, um, there's always been some designated time that professors or teaching assistants have set aside in their schedule each week, um, to host office hours. And so these are basically just any drop in hours that you can come if you have questions. You can come if you're worried about not catching up with content, but you can also come to if you're just looking to do work with someone or like just talk to the teaching assistants or the professor and like get to know them a little bit outside of classes as well. A lot of people come if they have questions, especially if you're like working on a problem set or something like that where you have where you maybe have worked through it and you're like, I don't know how to do this problem and I need a little bit more support. But you can also just go if you have no questions and just um be in company like with other students or the professor and teaching assistant themselves. Yeah. I mean, one way of thinking about what professor office hours are is a it's a continuation of the learning that you're doing in college. And it can either be the continuation of the conversation um or work that you're doing in a class, but it can also be an opportunity for you to speak to an adult about your experience in college and what you might want to do while you're in college or after college and get some additional mentorship and advice. >> Yeah, exactly. I think that's one big thing is that like in the times where I have just tried to Google something like it might be like mostly right but sometimes there's like a specific way a professor wants you to do a problem or like a specific resource they're they want you to use if you're like doing research or something. Um and so just asking them directly and getting a very specific and the right answer is much easier than like getting a very broad and like maybe the answer is right like on Google. So, I think it's it's always been very helpful. And it can be like if you have a quick question, you need to go somewhere else. It can be like you can just go ask it and they get your answer and go. There's no like obligation for you to stay the entire period of the office hours. Most of my office hours conversations with students are like 10 15 minutes and I'm in the humanities so sometimes they can go a little longer cuz those of us in the humanities we really like to talk. But it's reaffirming to you as a student and I think and to the professor like you are part of a community. You're part of this ongoing conversation and going to a professor's art office hours you're showing that you're invested in your learning. Another thing that I think a lot of students hesitate to do when they're first on campus is to take advantage of the tutoring that's available on campus. And I think something again that surprises a lot of people is how much tutoring is actually available and that at many many campuses there's like a tutoring center that's devoted to tutoring in a wide range of um wide range of subjects. Often those are called academic resource centers or arcs is is something that um language that you'll hear a lot. Um there are also um specific tutoring centers sometimes around things like writing you know so for example um many colleges have writing centers where there are peers who've been trained to give you feedback and support and ask you questions to help you develop your writing. There's also on a lot of campuses STEM tutoring centers. So tutoring specifically for math and the sciences >> [snorts] >> um and engineering. And so um and the reason why there are so many tutoring centers is not because we have so many students who are are super far behind like office hours. Tutoring is another opportunity for you to extend the conf conversation and get more information and knowledge so that you can succeed in the courses that you have. Um can you talk a little bit about your experience with tutoring? >> Yeah. Um for most of my classes, especially like the big introductory ones, um the courses have also had peer tutors in the class already built into the class. I think that's pretty common across most schools as well. Um, in like my first year when I was taking this like big introductory math class, um, I was pointed to by the professor, um, like to [clears throat] the tutoring center at Yale and they have like designated grad students, I believe, that are, um, that are tutors for specific undergrad classes. And so that's nice cuz like you know that the grad students know what they're talking about and like you know that they know the content very well. Um, and but there's also like peer tutors that I've taken advantage of where um I think those are helpful when it comes to like a little bit higher level classes where um the specific content might not be known by like those universitywide tutors but are known very well by the peer tutors since they've taken the class very recently. Um, I also had a class I was in an intro writing class my first year for our first research paper, I believe. And then our big one later, um, our professor actually made it part of the assignment to go like we had to go to the writing center because he was like, "You guys need to know like how to use it and so I'm just going to make you do it." Um, which was really nice because then I knew how to do it and I was like, "Oh, this is like super easy." And like a lot of a lot of places I think will have dropin hours so you can just go. you don't necessarily need an appointment, but if you know that you're going to need the help ahead of time, um having the appointment is helpful. And I think it also um I think the point of him making us do this too was so that we wouldn't like we would make progress on it before the due date. Um so he was like, you need to have met with them like by this time, which was nice cuz then I was like, okay, I guess I have to start my paper and like get some feedback on it before the due date and like have enough time. Yeah. And I want to point out that twice, not only for the writing center, but also for some of the STEM tutoring, your professor was the one who said, "Here are these resources." And it was like just a normal thing for the professor to do to refer you to those resources. And it wasn't because you were failing or, you know, you were having any particular kind of struggle. It's just like that's just the norm to again the learning takes place in the classroom but there's this expectation now that students are going to seek out the resources that are going to help them learn even beyond the classroom and tutoring is one of those places and and again at a lot of universities the tutoring is free um and I mean one of the biggest challenges is that so many people do use it sometimes it's a little hard to get in you know depending on on on your university and its resources um so looking into it early is really helpful. Student study groups, have you had experience with that and what has your experience been? >> Yeah. Um, I don't think I've been in a class where we were like put into specific study groups, but this is where I think the office hours came in very handy. Um, in the weeks where like I couldn't make it to office hours for some reason, like I I had this like group of people that I know I could lean on um and see if they could like assist me. And I think and also like in return um when the time came like I could help them. And I think one huge benefit of that is when you're the person like helping someone else it um is a reminder that you like know the content very well or it's also like another review for you. So um I think one thing is often said is like the best way to learn is by like teaching it. And so um that teaching it gives you a very easy way to tell if you yourself know the content at all. And so I think that's also really helpful for your own um studying strategies, but it's also there for you um when you do need to ask for help. And I think that's been really helpful as well. Um and I think another big thing is just like um meeting people in your classes. And so like um my classes got a lot smaller as I was entering my major classes. Um but getting to know my classmates that I knew I was going to be seeing in a lot of my different classes. um and like leaning on them and them leaning on me to figure out what's going on and like figuring out together is much easier than figuring it out by yourself. But as you just described, like approaching other people in the class, even if you're at a at a university that's like a commuter school and people are like arriving to class and then immediately leaving, like even if you can like whisper to the person you're sitting next to in class or me, you know, if you're in an online class together and you know, you're messaging them in the chat, just be like, "Hey, does anybody want to like get together on Zoom to talk about this at another time or like do you have t would you ever have like five and it, you know, like 15 minutes before after class. Once you do it, once you get the bravery up to like approach another student and say, "Hey, would you like to to put together a study group, like the benefits that you just described where um you know, you're spending even if it's just like a half hour and you guys have lunch together and you're talking about the class, you you're retaching yourself the material by discussing the material. um if you ever miss a class, you have somebody you can say, "Hey, can I get the notes from you and you can provide the notes for somebody else who's missed class?" And and you have this kind of like group of people who've who've got your back. So the second um group of resources is what I call the experiential learning resources. And again to recap for everybody like the experiential learning are those literally those experiences that you have while you're at college that are available to you at college um in which you are learning about the world about your subject matter but not in the classroom right um and there at every university there are offices and supports to help facilitate that experiential learning as well. One of the most famous ones is the career office. Almost every university has some kind of career office. Um the thing is that a lot of students, and I was one of those students, I'm like, "Oh, it's a career office, so I should wait until I'm ready to get my job after college to go." That is not the case. [laughter] like you should go, you know, to the career office. Um, as soon as you're thinking about what you might want to do for an internship or even like, you know, say you are a commuting student and you you have you're trying to get a job, you know, to support you while you're doing your your education. Sometimes those career offices can help you get a job now, right, to help support you while you're you're going through your education. Um, and it's but but it's really the resource that helps you connect what you're learning in the classroom to what you could do outside of college and after college, right? Um, and there's a wide variety of them. Um, you know, most of them love meeting with students. And then the other myth I think about career offices is that you have to know already what you're going to do before you go, right? Now, I will say if you just show up at the career office and be like, "So, what do you got?" They're going to be like, "I don't know. What do you got?" Right? [laughter] Um there there is a little bit like before you go to the career office, you might want to have spend some time thinking to yourself, talking to some faculty members, talking to some upper level, you know, to upper classmen about like, okay, so I'm a history major. What could I do with a history major? What kinds of things am I interested in? Am I interested in museums? Am I interested in being an educator? Am I interested in going to law school? Like, you know, there's some a little bit of work you have to do before you go and visit to to sort of narrow down like what is it that you that a you're interested in. And again, it doesn't have to be just one thing, though. You could say, "Well, I'm kind of torn. Maybe, you know, I want to go work at a museum or maybe I want to go to law school." Um, and you can go to the career office and say those two things. and they can come. But part of their job is to to introduce you to options >> and give you a guide to how to take advantage of those options. So if you're a first year, maybe you're thinking um what you know, I want to have a summer job. Like if you're like a traditional age student, you're 18, 19 years old, and you want to have a summer job um or a summer internship, you can go to the career office, you know, and say, "I I'm I'm interested in history, and you know, um I'm looking for a place where I could get some experience working in a museum." Um and they can point you towards opportunities either locally or even even farther away. uh and give you coaching on how to write a resume, how to ask somebody for a recommendation, how to write a cover letter, right? Um a lot of the universities have career offices that have a lot of that information already on their websites, but it's always good to have a person that you can talk to and get some guidance from. That's also something that I think people don't take as much advantage of as they should. Um, but yeah, I think the biggest thing about career offices is like you don't need to know everything going in, but if you have a little bit of something, they can help you um guide you or like show you more options that you think you might not even have thought of before. Um, and so it's really helpful to just like widen widen your um your possibilities and like see if that helps you in any way. And even when if they introduce you to something, you're like, I don't want I definitely don't want to do that. That's also like narrowing down your options. I think that actually happens to people way more often than like you realize. Um I think a lot of times people have like envision this like dream world and like all of the internships that they're going to have that line up to the dream job and then they like do their first one and they're like um that's not really what I had imagined. And that is like one of the great things if you go to the career centers early like go when you're a first year which again like I didn't because I I thought it wasn't for that but I'm telling you now go [laughter] right and and you like you can't know anything about a particular field or particular industry until you actually experience it. Right. The other thing talking about long-term relationships is the people at the career office are mentors for you and mentors for you for the long term. Right? So often career offices are organized around general areas of field. So you may have somebody who does um prehealth, maybe somebody who does communications, maybe somebody who does arts and nonprofits. Um, and you get to know that person and they can help guide you over the long term as you're changing too. And even if you decide to change fields completely, they can do an warm handoff between you and another person in their office. Right? Again, all of these are free to the students. It's part of what you're paying for when you're paying your tuition. It's not just the faculty member in the classroom. We're paying for all of these experiences that are central for helping you, you know, move into the career or the role in society that you want to have after college. A couple of other things that that universities often have offices for. One is this thing called fellowships. When I got to college, I had no idea what a fellowship is. And it's still kind of hard to explain what a fellowship is. It's kind of like a a like a sort of scholarship that often an alumni or somebody else has given to the university or there's are external fellowship programs that are related to you know research or nonprofits and um it's a chunk of money that has a time limitation on it, right? like you you can be on a fellowship for three months, often during the summer or six months or a year where um you get to go and um often at the college level it's you get to go and do your re do research on or have an experience on a topic that is of interest to you. Yeah. Yeah. And I think one thing that um kind of surprised me too about the fellowships are that sometimes they're like for very niche things. So like a lot of times I think it's like that whoever like provided the money for it was also very interested in this very niche topic or they want more people to be interested in it. And so it's like you have to go to this country or like this region and study this language for like this amount of time or like something like that. And so a lot of times like you may find you might you may think that like what you're interested in is like very niche and no one's going to fund it but like sometimes like there is something that is going to fund it and it is like it matches exactly like with what you want to do. And so I think don't ever count out like what you're interested in and like if you're interested in something if you're interested in doing research for something um there's some way to fund it. Um there are a lot of fellowships that will fund research in the especially in the sciences. Um also fellowships if you're in the arts and humanities there are often fellowships in uh for connected to libraries not only at your own university but at other universities. In the social sciences, there can be data fellowships, right? Where you're um you know working with a researcher at another university or at your own university and you're helping them compile and and um analyze data. And then finally, also language learning. You mentioned it really briefly like you sometimes you you might get you could there are fellowships for you to go to Bulgaria and and learn Bulgarian, right? um they exist and maybe it's something that you never thought you'd ever do and you never really you don't even know if it's useful. But just the experience of being in a foreign country, learning a different language, experiencing a different culture, that is an incredible um an an incredible life experience that has applications beyond the university. Um study abroad. So my experience with study abroad was uh there's no way I can study abroad because I can't afford it. Um and so I never even looked into it. And that is the biggest regret I have from being at university. Seriously, like it really is like I I I you know I had really wanted to go and study in Ireland. [laughter] Um you know as a lit as a a person who loved literature I mean I mean that's one of the the great places of of English language literature is Ireland. Um and I just I was like I can't even afford the plane ticket. How would I be able to afford to study abroad there? Um much has changed in the last 30 years around study abroad. More and more universities are realizing that a study abroad experience is a central experience for many students and they are making it more accessible by having for example scholarships that will help people study abroad. Even if you think you can't do it, if you have any interest in doing it at all, you need to go to the office and just talk to them. I mean, maybe it'll turn out like maybe it's not something that you can do, but ask ask because that, you know, again, like that was the biggest regret I had was not studying abroad. Um, and it probably would have been possible if I had just gone and asked about it. A couple of other leading resources that are important are um research opportunities, right? And um not every university is a research school, but every faculty member is doing research, right? Um and you know, we think often of research as like lab research, right? Um but I'm a humanities person and I got to do research with a faculty member, a humanities faculty member. Um, and what that often can entail is, you know, I mean, in the humanities, it can often be a professor assigns you a topic and wants you to go and gather books and articles on that particular topic and and write an annotated bibliography so that it makes the um faculty members writing and research more efficient. And what you learn through that research experience can be like, well, how do you actually do the research, right? And it's the same thing in the in the um social sciences and STEM. Like doing research helps you figure out more about the field and how knowledge gets made in that field and allows you to test out like oh are you somebody who who likes research. Sometimes there the the expectation of your participation in a research lab or in that kind of like research that you might do with a professor is like five hours a week, right? um which you know if you're doing a lot of things that can seem like a lot but it's not 20 hours a week necessarily. That's the other thing that I think sometimes gives people pause. They think oh if I'm doing research that's going to take up half my time but really it can be like anytime you can give the faculty member is often frequently just grateful right because you're you are moving their research forward just a little bit. One thing that people don't think of as a experiential learning opportunity but totally is is a campus job. >> Yeah. I had multiple campus I had like there were multiple times in my career where I had like three campus jobs going on at the same time. Um and I was learning something in each of them, right? Like I I had a a job as a writing center tutor. I had a job as a research assistant for a faculty member. Um I also had a job um as an usher at the um at our performance space at our main performance space on campus. I actually think about the first time I ever actually saw a live ballet was because I was working for the performance space, right? Um, campus jobs are things you can put on your resume. Campus jobs are, you know, even if you're thinking about, oh, I'm getting this job so that I can pay for my books. um like they can also be sources of mentorship and they can also be sources of learning that you know like you I I mean honestly I had the person who hired me to work at the at the campus um performance space went on to having her her first job out of college was working for an arts nonprofit in part based on the work that she had done in you know in running. She had gotten to a higher position by the time she was a junior and senior and you know she was basically running a lot of the the performance space and so her first job after college was running a performance space. >> Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I think also like campus jobs can offer different like depending on what you're looking to get out of it, there's a lot of different options for you. Like if you're looking to like just pay for your books and like your bills and things like that, like you can find jobs that are higher paying and like maybe you're not as interested in them, but they are higher paying and like you can spend less time doing getting more bang for your buck literally. Um, and so, um, and then [clears throat] there's also other ones where if you're more interested in experience, um, like things like maybe you are really interested in the arts and you want to learn more about how like production is run, things like that, like those are also available. um if you're looking for something that's more chill and like you can also like you can help something in the library but you're also getting paid um at the same time like there's a lot of different avenues for um how you like how different jobs might and which ones are available for you. Um one that like I started this year was like being a peer liaison for the Asian-American Cultural Center. And so like that was one thing that I had always like I think I'd always done a lot of mentorship like in high school and in college. Um but it was nice to like be getting paid for it cuz like it was it was something that I was really excited about and like wanted to connect with first years um and like be still be in a mentorship role but then I also got to be paid for it. So it's like you can find ways I think like if you're really into like mentorship for example you can find ways to um like there are jobs that will pay for you to be mentors even if like you haven't done that in the past. So another place where you can get experiential learning but also feel a sense of community which is the third topic that we really wanted to talk about um is extracurriculars, right? And um one of the things big differences between extracurriculars in high school and extracurriculars as a college is in high school it was really easy for a lot of students to do multiple extracurriculars. Extracurriculars in college actually often require just like a little bit more time and a little bit more energy. So you can't do 10 things. You can maybe do like three things or four things. Depends on how there are some people who do like five extracurriculars and I'm always amazed like how do you get anything else done and somehow they just do it. Um but most of the students that I know who are, you know, are able to keep on top of their academic work, have some community, um you know, have a social life, you know, have a campus job. They're usually doing again like maybe two or three extracurriculars, but they're doing a lot for those extracurriculars, right? They may have um a position, a leadership position. Um it may be um you know, we're going to talk in a minute about some service and volunteering. It may be something that they do really regularly that's like a little bit more intensive. Um, but extracurriculars are a huge part of learning at the university. And again, even if you're at a commuter school, you're in that situation where you know you have a lot of work outside of and other responsibilities outside of campus. Even to do just one extracurricular, if you can manage to find the time for that, it can produce incredible benefits. if you're part of something that you really are passionate about and like really enjoy, you're surrounded by like other like-minded people who are also really passionate and care a lot about um whatever this like particular group might be. And so being in the same space as people who like you may have otherwise not met like through your classes or through any other things that you're involved with um is a it's a really great way to meet new people and also feel um that sense of community. And if it's fun, then it just gives you this release. Like school is intense. You need to have a release. And again, like moving to our third topic, like you also need to have community. And extracurriculars is the number one way to get some community and connection outside of the classroom. Another great place through service and volunteering. Take yourself outside of the university for a little bit and get grounded a little bit in the community that the university is part of. and it can be incredibly fulfilling. I mean, another opportunity um that many many universities have are um either affinity centers, cultural centers or student groups that um are around cultural identity and affinity. And for so many students, that's a place of community because when you're coming like for for almost all students, when you're coming to a university, it's just so different. right? It's so different from your home space. If you're traveling outside of your state, like that's a huge cultural difference. I'm like, I'm from the west. I still find some things about the East Coast, even though I've been living here for a really long time. I'm like, what? You know, you you do feel like a stranger in a strange land sometimes when you become a college student. And um sometimes it's nice to be able to connect with others who share similar cultural experiences. um similar histories um and as a way of finding um community and identity and comfort. Um and so a lot of un and and again the research shows that when students feel high degrees of belonging, when they feel supported by communities, when they can see other people who are like them succeeding on campus, they are more likely to succeed in college. And so for many students, an affinity group, um, a cultural center, a student organization that's focused on culture and cultural identity can be really, really important for their success at college. >> Yeah. Yeah. Now, one big one that I've it's like been a full circle moment for me, but I think I mentioned this previously, but now I'm a peer liaison for the Asian-American Cultural Center and all of our cultural centers um at Yale have peer peer leaison, which are either sophomores, juniors, or seniors who um mentor like the first years who are affiliated with those centers. Um, and so I remember like my first year my period leism was so funny and like he like showed us around and like bought us food and stuff and like we got to connect um and just like get to know him and um know our way around campus too. And it was like a really good way for me to meet other like Asian identifying people in my college. So it there's our our centers have um like couches and living rooms and kitchens and even and meeting rooms and libraries and things like that. So it also offers like um if your university offers like a physical space that for these affinity groups um it's nice to also be in a different space with those people. And it's not just like a you know cultural affinity spaces. It could be a religious affinity space. It can be, you know, um spaces dedicated to LGBTQ. Like, um they're really important to have for um students to feel a sense of belonging and community. Um sometimes in a university that is is sometimes so caught up in the the work of um educating students in a very intellectual way. This is a place where you can get, you know, comfort and education in like a cultural and spiritual way and that's important too. Our last group of things that we want to talk about um is resources for personal and financial wellness and wellness could be defined like wellness is just be like can you find a space where you're feeling or or or a condition where you feel like you're thriving, right? And that includes academics, it includes the experiential learning, includes the extracurriculars in the community, but it's also yourself. Are you feeling good? You can't learn if you're not feeling good yourself as an individual. So, um, lots of universities have done a really great job of expanding their resources for mental health and wellness. Um, and that can look like, you know, short-term uh opportunities to meet with clinicians um when you're having a a need to have a little of advice and support. It could look like weekly therapy sessions. It could look like group therapy. It could look like um you know getting some advice on releasing stress. It could be looking it could look like goat yoga, right? whatever it ta you know often universities have invested in students being well because students have so much stress there's financial stress there's just the stress out in the world there's a stress of being going to a a new environment that you've never been in before so looking for these mental health and wellness activities usually there are multiple places where you can get that at Yale we have both professional counseling and peer counseling um you know we have a wellness a center that offers activities, you know, almost every day. Um, you know, you there's a room where you can actually sleep if you we have a nap room because you know what, sleep is really really important for your functioning. Um, and talking to someone about how do you manage your sleep like with one of our wellness counselors like that's really really important. And then the last thing is really that financial piece. Um, college is expensive. A lot of people are taking on debt to go to college and that can be a burden like it can be a mental burden. Figuring out how to balance the financial piece. Um often the financial aid office is the place that can help you figure that out, right? A lot of people think, "Oh, I go to the financial aid office at the beginning and then whenever I have to turn in a form." Um, you should be making a relationship with the people at the financial aid office because like for example, if you want to go study abroad, financial aid is one of those places that where you can go and maybe get some assistance in working out what is possible for you in terms of being able to pay for studying abroad or pay for an experience or you know what, you have a bill and you are $500 away from paying that bill. um and you are getting letters from the f from you know the the um the billing office from the university go to the financial aid office and say hey you know what they're threatening to kick me out because I haven't paid this $500 what can we do and often the financial aid office may have some options for you to help get you you're like you should never be leaving university you should never be leaving college because you have a bill that's an unpaid bill of just a couple hundred dollars, right? They will work with you. Um, also they can be a source of financial literacy, right? So, like for example at Yale, we have an entire website devoted to financial literacy. Um, how to make a budget for yourself as a um university student. um how to plan for things like if you wanted to go study abroad or how to plan for like if you're living on campus and you need to um sustain yourself over the summer like how do you get a job for that? How do you plan out your bills if you're living off campus? Um a lot of universities either through their financial aid office or through student affairs offices, they have resources for you to help figure out your financial life. And I think like the biggest takeaway from all of this is like you have to ask um like nothing is going to happen if you don't ask someone about it. And even if like the person that you ask doesn't know that you can usually ask people that will point you to the direction in which you need to go to. And so I think that's especially like a big thing when it comes to money is that like if you just don't know like a a lot of these things take a lot of time to learn and like the skills um need to be built up and if you don't start somewhere you're never going to go anywhere. So, um, yeah, I think there's definitely there's a lot of resources. Like I'm learning now. There's a financial literacy website. [laughter] So, I'm going to go check that out after this. But yeah, so someone knows something and so it just a matter of how to get to the resources that you need. Extracurriculars may serve [music] a different set of purposes in college than they did in high school. Instead of joining a lot of different clubs, many college students focus on just a few [music] extracurriculars that they can engage with meaningfully and find opportunities for growth and leadership as well as [music] for community and fun. You want to get involved in extracurriculars, but you don't want to get overwhelmed. [music] To guide us through finding the right balance of involvement, we talked to applied math major Deja, who has a great approach to the extracurriculars [music] and thinking in terms of seasons. By the end of this module, my hope is that you strategically invest in experiences that shape you personally and professionally and reflect your [music] values and aspirations. Before you came to college, how did you think about extracurriculars? So, I really had no idea what extracurriculars in college look like. My perceptions of college was largely shaped by like TV because I'm the first person in my family to go to college. So, I didn't really have like that window in. And on the TV shows of people in college, they don't really do much clubs. They're usually like involved in like relationship drama, like, oh, my classes are hard, this, that, and the third. Um, and clubs are kind of thrown away. So, I really like didn't know what to expect. And then when we had the visitation day, we had the extracurricular fair and there was just like so many clubs and I was like, what does half of these clubs mean even? Like I don't know. So like my only idea of like clubs in college is like oh they must be like in high school you know like you get around do a meeting maybe you do like some service project if it's like national honor society or something like that maybe you do some academic bowl or something but pretty low commitment pretty like stress fee like something you can fit around your schedule but an extracurriculars in college like if you put a lot of time into it you're going to get more out of it versus if you're kind of more of a casual member, like it's not going to be as fulfilling, which is like totally fine for some clubs. But yeah, >> I I love that distinction that you're making that clubs in college tend to be really student driven and that's why the clubs are what you make of it. So it it for some students I think clubs are a place where they have social time like they can make friends. They're doing something that is of common interest to them. Um um but then there are other times when you join a club and you really want to make an impact in whatever that might mean. Maybe that means you take a leadership position. Maybe that impact means that you take the club into a new direction that hasn't happened before. the the idea of that like an extracurricular or club is what you make of it um actually is I hope students find that empowering right because it's one of the places where you get to choose and you get to choose not just what you do but how you want to develop as a person through this experience. >> Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Like, you know, there are different clubs for different needs. Like, there are more social like community- based clubs. You know, I used to be in the Black Student Alliance at Yale my freshman year. It was a great way to meet other black students. Like, there's that. There's professional development clubs like what you were saying, like things where you develop a skill or like you do some pre-professional training. I know I'm personally involved with the Yell chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers. Go NISBY. Um, so yeah, like as the name implies, we work on providing a community for black engineers on campus and connecting them with job opportunities out in the industry. There's service based clubs where you can make an impact not even just at Yale, but like in the community, in the world even, depending on the club. Um, there's fun clubs, what I deem fun clubs, where you get to do things that like maybe in another context 21 year olds wouldn't really be doing. I'm on the double Dutch team. I learned to double Dutch. I have never doubled Dutch any time in my life. I learned at the grand age of 20. And yes, I will be performing in my double Dutch team. And it's just like something that's like fun and like I get to hang out with my friends and I get to like not do homework for like two hours a week and just like double Dutch. Like why not like move my body like you know? Um but yeah, like again like it's what I put of it, you know? So like my double dutch team I don't necessarily go to every single practice every week cuz it's more of just like a fun like when I have the time to have the time versus something like NISBY is something that I have put a lot of time into blood and sweat and tears not to exaggerate but like it is something where I decided like this is a community where I want to be a part of this work I think is important as a black engineer on campus and like yeah they're valid and I mean there are some clubs here that are like not even minorly There are investment clubs that are managing like thousands of dollars worth of like portfolio whatever things like there are the Yel Computing Society has engineers or student engineers that are working on like apps that students across campus use like course table you know an app that we have for or a website that students use for like choosing their courses. It's like something everyone uses like everyone and their mama like and it's like something that students created like it was a student's idea and it was students maintaining it like like that's what I'm saying like clubs are really like what you make of it. So from all of your extracurriculars and your experiential learning opportunities like what do you think you've gained by participating in this like wide array of of things? >> Yeah. So through my extracurriculars just a like meeting different sorts of people you know like even people that I wouldn't have necessarily met otherwise like you know the National Society of Black Engineers I'm meeting other black engineers across campus and a variety of majors that I wouldn't have necessarily come across double Dutch there's all sorts of people in there so getting to meet and hang out with those sorts of people and then like another thing is like the professional skills that I've gained through some of the clubs you know not all clubs is necessarily a resume building thing, but some of them are like NISSBY. I've learned so many things through my leadership position at NISBY. I've learned, you know, project management, how to what it means to be a leader, how to delegate, like what it takes to run a club, what it takes to send people to a conference. Oh, that was a stressful time in my life. Like what sorts of components it comes to like even like running a club in the first place or like building a club up really. cuz when I joined Nisby, Nisby was like a figment of its former glory. It was one of those clubs that died out during co and so like my involvement was NISBY really was like a building it from the ground up sort of thing which was like really fulfilling like definitely has been one of my biggest achievements at Yale. Like one of my favorite parts like building that community of black engineers like it's my baby but yeah like being able to leave that legacy at Yale is really great. you're you are getting real world skills um that you can talk about in a professional setting but also is about like sort of your own maturity and your own um personal development, right? Like take you know like you you obviously you have an emotional connection to Nisby, right? And you feel proud of it. Um and that just doing that doing if you were only doing that just for yourself that would be a great reason to be doing it, right? But then also to have this like professional opportunity on top of it. >> Yeah. I know when I'm interviewing for like jobs, I have talked about my experiences in NISBY or any other club like whenever they have like a oh what was the time you worked in a team? Like what's a project you're really proud of? Like I've said Nisby is the project I'm really proud of. Even though I'm interviewing more so for like technical like software engineering roles, NISBY is a project I really am proud of of accomplishing and being a part of. So yeah, I'll talk about my role in leading NISBY. Like yeah, or like projects that I worked in for the Yale Computing Society has been on my resume. Like my leadership positions on campus do end up on my resume, my LinkedIn, and it is something that people talk to me about. My research is something that people talk to me about. Um students often think of especially they think about getting that summer internship maybe the junior year before um before their senior year as being really crucial but you can actually start much earlier. Right. Um so can you tell me a little bit about some of the summer internships that you got? >> Yeah so the summer after my freshman year I did a software engineering internship at a financial institution. Um, it was in New York City and it was a program specifically for freshman computer science students, which is something not a lot of people know exists. There are definitely internships out there specifically designed for freshman or sophomore in a variety of fields. How did you find out about those? I went to a career fair here on campus which is just another opport uh example of like being involved like staying in touch with on campus and then I was in the room and I was the only black woman in the room actually which was cuz it was like a CS career affair and the only other black woman in the room was like at the company that I ended up working with foreshadowing. So I was like, "Hi, like it's nice to meet you. Like it's nice to not be alone, you know, like I really like am glad to see someone that looks like me on the other side of this table, you know, representation." And so through that connection, she shared her LinkedIn with me and then from there they she was like, "Oh, like we're piloting this new program for freshmen specifically and we're it's a small program. We're just seeing how it runs, but when it opens, I'll let you know." I was like, "Oh, like thank you so much." And so when the program opened, she sent me the application. She let me use her as a referral and then you know the rest is history. But like that's really like the power of networking. Like I would have never known about that opportunity if I hadn't like gone up and introduced myself. So yeah. And you did that as a first year student because again like I mean I think I had I had in my head when I was in college that oh that's something you do later >> like getting that early experience with an internship or just even with networking like pushing yourself to as a first year to go to a career fair and intro walk up and introduce yourself to somebody and and talk with them like even if nothing came out of that like you got into an environment That's a professional environment that you'd never been in before. >> And I think that like I guess I I'm I'm kind of encouraging more and more of my first year students to go and do what you did, not necessarily having to get an internship, but like go to this career fair, go to this networking event, just try it out so that you get more knowledge about the possibilities. Um, and the earlier you get the knowledge, the um, easier it is to put it into practice when it really does come time for getting like that that internship after your your junior year or that job offer after your your senior year or in your senior year. Let's talk a little bit about fellowships because I know I had never really heard the word fellowship until I stepped onto a college campus. >> Yeah. So, a fellowship is really a scholarship. Like that's how I understand it. And sometimes it's to fulfill a certain like project. I know the fellowship I'm on is specifically for a research project. Sometimes it's to supplement your housing as you like work a certain job or do some volunteer opportunities or something like that. A lot of fellowships are for like graduate school. Um so there's no scholarships for graduate school. It's called fellowships if any of you were interested in searching that up. Um and those could be like to go get a master's or a PhD or something like that. really fellowships are just money people give you to develop yourself whether professionally, personally, or in some other realm. >> Yeah, I think that's a great definition. And just to make it clear, like it's it's it's money. It's grant money. It's money you don't have to pay back. Um and it is to fund I love this personal or professional development. Um and sometimes universities um themselves have some fellowship funds that they can provide for students and that often students will have to apply for and compete for. Um sometimes the fellowships you get are external fellowships. So you're part of the Melan Maze Buchet program um which is a a nationwide program. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Basically we're paid money to work on an independent research project of our choosing. I get to explore something that to be honest I never thought I would have explored like getting to dive into my own research project and shape it how I want in a way that I couldn't really do if I was like in a lab or something like that. Like as far as the application process, I applied my sophomore spring. I learned about it through a flyer. I was just walking and I saw this fly. I was like, "Oh, that's kind of cool." So, like, yeah, keep your heads up as you're walking through campus, I guess, like just stay aware about the possibilities. And I was like, "Oh, like this seems kind of cool. I wonder what this is about." I went to an info session about it. Kind of got a little bit more information about it. I was like, "All right, I'm g apply. Like, why not? like let's try it. So, you know, I applied, I interviewed, and then I got it. Yay. So, that was pretty interesting. But application processes for different fellowships require different things. So, I know I had to do like an essay and a research statement and like give my transcript and things like that, but it just depends on the specific fellowship. >> Yeah. And there's different kinds of fellowships. So there can be I mean the one that you have um goes over a couple of academic years and you have regular meetings during the academic year and then there's the summer research component between junior and senior year. Um there are other fellowships that are only for the summer. A lot of people think fellowships are for after you graduate, and there are plenty after you graduate, but um there are plenty that also help you out when you're in in school and can be an incredible experience. Yeah. So, I studied abroad this previous summer. I went to London, which is really great. It was actually my first time abroad ever. Like, I got my passport like a month before I went. So that was like really like crazy cuz no one in my family had has ever been abroad. So I was like wow like living the dream like a generational dream. Like I was like this is crazy. It I was lucky enough to be able to cover the entire cost of the program with the money that y'all gave me. Thank you so much. And yeah I got that great experience. But I know there are like a litany of fellowships like even if your institution does not give you that sort of support. I know like the study abroad program I did like was giving out scholarships to go to people who couldn't afford to go. So like there are definitely fellowships out there to go and do these opportunities. >> That's great. I'm going to ask you a little bit more about that experience, but I really want to hammer home what you just said, which is that um you know the support for study abroad at different colleges and universities varies, but it's always worth it to ask. That's like probably my biggest regret in college was I didn't do study abroad because I thought I couldn't afford it. Um but if I had only gone and asked I could have found out what my options are like your study abroad experience like to get it back to this idea of um like what you learn and what you're learning outside the classroom. I mean we you were taking classes but then you were also experiencing London like tell tell me about like sort of the things that you learned or the ways that you changed from from that study abroad experience. >> Yeah. Well the study abroad program itself was very different for me because it was a humanities based program cuz I don't really get time during the semester to take humanities and if I do they're kind of my throwaway classes. No hate, sorry. But like if I'm choosing between having to do a P set like something that's going to affect my major, like I'm sorry, like you're not getting that attention. But like since I was only taking humanities and I was taking a lighter coursework, I got to really dive into the material. Like it's actually pretty interesting. Like what's up? Um but then also just being in an entirely new continent like that was like wow. Like I mean like even like their accents like hearing their accents in person like wow and they were like your accent's the weird one. I was like this is crazy but I really got to see like well a I got to see like how the world views America cuz this summer was pretty crazy in terms of American politics to be honest. There was a lot going on. Like I saw Trump getting shot at in a Budapest bar or a am I allowed to say I was in a bar? Yes, you are. >> Okay. [laughter] >> It really like opened my eyes. Like before I never was interested in studying and traveling much just cuz like I never done it. No one in my family had ever done it and all I knew was that it was expensive. So I was like why would I? But now that I've actually like been to these places, been to these historical places, like experiencing it, like it's like so much more different than just being in a computer screen. >> Mentorship is one of the essential experiences that ensures every student's [music] college success. But maybe you've never really experienced mentorship and are unsure about how to access this crucial guidance. Where do you start? How do you ask for a mentor? How do you keep things professional and not overstep? To show you exactly how to approach this, [music] we'll talk to Rudy, who has plenty of experience in the work world and can speak to his experience finding mentors and adviserss in college. Crucially, know that accessing mentorship starts as soon as you step on campus. So, get started as soon as you can and good luck. So, today we're going to be talking about mentorship. I will be honest, like you, when I came to college, I had no clue that one of my jobs as a student was to find a mentor. What I discovered both through my own experience and now in the work that I do with students is that mentorship is one of the most key things that can happen um for for students in their academic career. And for a lot of college students, this might be the very first time they're hearing about mentorship or mentorship even as a thing that you are trying to get out of your college experience. Um, so I'm going to just start off Rudy by asking you like before you came to college, what did you think mentorship was? Or did you even think about it at all? >> From just the perspective of having to redo college, I thought mentorship was a action or a training scenario that you went through after you had already graduated. I assumed a mentor was um just an advocate that you had in your public or private setting of whatever profession you had endeavored. Um and I realized that that just wasn't the case. Mentorship was u this action that you have um with an advocate who's trying to help you with a specific set of goals um that requires a little bit of transparency, a little bit of intimacy. Um, and a lot of in many cases, um, I think the best thing that I probably learned is that mentors actually really want to help, right? In many cases, they're giving up a lot of their time, um, speaking to you about any specific discipline or career goal or academic goal that you have. And um, in some cases, I found myself asking like, why is this person who doesn't owe me anything giving me so much of their time? And um, some of the best responses was that they just wanted to help. That was it. Like they were just they were not looking for anything in return. Uh they were not looking for a trade-off. There was nothing for me to do for them in the future. It was more like hey um I went up through this system. I got help through the system. I'm hoping to give back and help in the same system. Um and that was really fulfilling to kind of learn that um it was just kind of community paying back uh to some extent. And I think that's where a lot of great mentorship really comes from, which is the ability to ask questions like, I just don't know how to even start this thing or this goal or this path that I'm hoping to get on. Um, this is where I'm currently at. Can you provide some feedback? >> When you're looking for a mentor in the college context, that looking for that mentorship should really start the first year. Like you said, you were thinking, "Oh, this is something I do after college." But it's really in that first year because the path that you're going to be taking through college is going to be unique to you. And um so yes, there may be, you know, a hundred other people in your college or university who want to have similar majors or maybe have similar career goals, but there are also a hundred different pathways to get there. >> It really does start in year one. and what for many of us especially returning students um it's a great opportunity to just kind of recalibrate on those expectations um I think that uh mentorship like you said um I think it it's more than one person no there's no one person who can take on the responsibility of your entire mentorship experience um because they they'll definitely have a something that they're an expert in um academics um a certain type of sector of the economy that you really want to penetrate or or get exposure to or just academia and research, right? Like it's it's just completely different what you go into. I think the best way for a first year student to kind of have an idea of what that mentorship looks like is to really hone in on the type of majors or academic disciplines that you really want to spend time learning through. So just, you know, I really want to highlight the idea that like mentorship can come from almost anywhere. Um, it it does not have to be someone who looks like you or has your exact background or grew up in the same exact situation. I find that so many people are willing to help. Um, if you're if you're willing to ask for it number one and state what kind of what the purpose or goal is. >> I love that you're talking about this because really mentorship and being able to get mentorship is having openness to learn from anyone. Um, and you know, we've been talking a little bit about mentors who are maybe aligned with your academic interests or professional interests. And sometimes you can learn things from people who maybe they're younger than you, but maybe they have a little bit more experience in that particular discipline or that particular area of um, a career interest. Um, but there are also mentors that you have just because you connect with them, right? um like you and I like we kind of have a mentoring relationship in part because we're both from the same area of the country. And having someone who's kind of a mentor who who maybe gets you more on a personal side and a lived experience side can be as helpful as having someone who's giving you sort of more of that like technical guidance of okay here's how you apply to get a fellowship where you can um study for a summer um you know or get some opportunities to do research. Um it can you know we both know college can be challenging not just in terms of the tasks that are set before you but also like emotionally because you're changing a lot as a student. There's uh I had a mentor uh who's a senior adviser in the math department who I was just expressing like some vulnerabilities about how I felt a bit insecure on in the department and um you know I was sharing like going to office hours and doing study groups and preparing for exams and at one point past the midterm he was vulnerable enough to just share he's like I don't think I ever thought I belonged in my department as an undergrad. He's like I went on to do a PhD there. He's like this is he was honest in a way where I think his words were this is the cost of entry that I think a lot of people aren't willing to admit or state out loud. It was great to kind of meet humans who were just very excited to share some of that content uh where maybe at the time you didn't feel that way. >> To get good mentorship, you have to be you yourself have to be vulnerable and that a good mentor is also someone who will be vulnerable with you, >> right? Because um I think one of the mistakes that I see a lot of my first year students making is thinking like oh I can't talk to that professor or I can't talk to that dean or I can't talk to that adviser because I have to be I have to be spectacular. I have to have all my stuff together and only if I have all my stuff together will they will it make it worth their while to attend to me right because we all know faculty are busy you know staff are busy and and a lot of good-hearted students are like I don't want to traml on their time >> yeah that's that's a great point and I think part of that may u come from um a bit of like natural very natural insecurity that you you look at a mentor whether whether they're a academic peer or a department head or someone in industry and you're like, "Wow, they're amazing. They're phenomenal." You look at their resume or their pedigree or the classes they've taken and you're just like, "How could I ever even think that I might become that person?" Um, but you're never going to see the list of things that they failed at. You're never going to see the list of insecurities that they had, the relationships that maybe just didn't follow through, the the failed pets, right? none of these things get listed and um it was after speaking to mentors like I I had one um in the computer science department I was like yeah I failed this I failed a specific class twice in college and then I went and did a PhD in it like this was I I remember just thinking to myself like now you're just lying to me like this isn't true and he was just like yeah I was just my curiosity was greater than my resilience of thinking that I wasn't going to get this >> and I think once students are able to realize that um that it's okay to struggle. Um but it's it's what you really need um when it comes to like feedback is like the type of recalibration that you and the approaches that you take on with that struggle like how am I studying? What are my habits? How am I allocating my time? Um how am I prioritizing certain deadlines compared to others? I think uh mentorships and mentors can be great at giving you feedback for what they think is working and not working. And I think [snorts] part of having a successful relationship at that point with your mentor is being open to the idea that what they're going to tell you may not be what you want to hear, but that they have very good intentions. Um, because they want to see you succeed and at that moment you might be too close to the problem to to give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Like if I want people to walk away with one thing from this conversation is that they need to that that if you are willing to talk to anybody about your passions and your interests again you don't you know going to a faculty member after you failed an exam and saying hey you know I want to talk to you because I want to know how to do better that faculty member is going to get so excited because they also want you to do better, >> right? Um, and I think going through the world, you know, figuring, you know, with the assumption, okay, other people actually do want to help me, that's actually genuinely true at most institutions. Now, you're going to run into that one person who's having a bad day or they have other things that they need to prioritize other than mentorship. And when that happens, you just look for someone else to talk to. Um, and also like these sort of a little bit more adult things of like, yeah, I don't have to be perfect to impress someone. What's going to be more impressive is me showing curiosity and me showing vulnerability and the desire to do something better or to the desire to learn something new. >> Um, if you make an appointment with a mentor to show up on Zoom or show up at a place, um, be on time, you know, be early, uh, be respectful. this person is is willing to give up a lot of their time to just learn about you and give you advice. You don't want to lose trust by not putting it on your calendar, by showing up 20 minutes late. Um, you know, have a list of questions that you hope to get answered. So, ideally, you should have one or two things that you're hoping to learn from. Um, and then some probing questions that they can help support you. And then ideally, you're asking for feedback in that moment. And then afterwards, um, always try to send a thank you. thank you letter, uh, a thank you note. Um, and then if there's a specific followup or a relationship that they're hoping that they're going to make or a connection that they can make, just, you know, I think it's it's pretty tasteful and in a respectful manner to it's okay to just say, "Hey, you brought up um meeting with such and such and that you if I was interested that you'd be willing to make that connection. I'd really appreciate it if you went ahead and did that." Um, I think these soft skills really matter because um, no one else can do them but you, right? Like your your mentor definitely wants to help regardless of the discipline or the area or even if they're peers. U, but you don't want to take them for granted. And I think it becomes very easy to accidentally give the impression that that's what you've done. Uh, so it really matters that you, you know, you answered their email or return a phone call if they left a voicemail. I think that just goes a long way. So, what do you think is is an example of something where you would not bring something to a mentor? >> Th that is actually a great question because again, we're we're human beings trying to figure out these new roles, right? And for for our you know traditional age students as a 18 19 year old >> sometimes it's hard to figure out you know like what is professional in terms of being a student and what's not. Um >> I I mean I have a professional example which is you never ask a mentor for a job like you like it's just it's a it's kind of a professional no no right like even if it's a firm you really want to work at right like um that's something that um you know I was told by a mentor once they're like hey like just never put me in a situation where I have to tell you no right and I was like oh that's fair I I mean I had not done that but they were but they were very clear of like I've had that happen. Um, so I think that's a good professional one. I think anytime we ask a mentor to make a professional or academic exception for you where they wouldn't make it for anyone else, I think that's a line like whatever that scenario is. If you if you if you're fully aware that this is an exception that they wouldn't make for anyone else, that's probably a boundary you don't want to cross just because you're losing trust there. It may be that at some point you might ask for like a letter of recommendation or something like that, but for the most part the mentorship is really about learning as much as you can from the expertise of that other person. Um I think some some boundaries that you do want to draw, one of them is that this is a professional relationship and not a personal relationship no matter how like sort of friendly you become, right? Um, and that, you know, they're there to kind of help you develop as a student. Um, they're there to help you to develop as a as a pre-professional person. They are not necessarily there to um uh fix the problems in your life. You can talk to the you can talk to your mentor and say, "I need some resources, right?" But you're never asking the mentor directly for those resources. So like if so I have students who do come to me sometimes with some of those issues and I'm able to say well I know the resources here at my institution that can help you solve that problem. But I personally am you know like I I can't fix that problem myself as a mentor. it can feel very overwhelming to even know where to start. Um, as a student, you're trying to just do it the right way. How do you think are some effective ways to find mentors? >> I think you you start with the people around you that you like and find interesting. And there are multiple levels of this. So up here that is in your class can be a mentor to you. And just talking to that person about like what is interesting to you can unlock a whole bunch of things that maybe that person is also interested in and and maybe have some experience with and can take you to the next step. um faculty members um staff members in a wide variety of capacities right like some of our best members mentors at our institution I mean our faculty are amazing but sometimes it's the staff who really know how to get things done and have been at the institution for a really long time and that staff could include um people who work at the learning support centers um your you know your advisor your dean Um you know um the the best one the administrators who uh the administrative assistants who work in the department offices often know everything about the department and know everything about the major um and can really help you. Um so like those are some places to look around like if you're like okay I I need help. I need to find information. It can be the peers that you have surrounding you. Sometimes if you're living on campus, you might have a resident assistant. They're a great person to talk to. Um upper level students who are in some of the extracurriculars you might be in. Or in your on if you have an onampus job, you're often working with other students who may have a little bit more experience than you. Um they're just all around you. But the key is and this is the hard part because I think that um when we have something that we are really passionately interested in sometimes it's hard for us to share it right because it's precious to us and you're you know and not not all of us have always had somebody cheerleading for them right like for for me to say I want to go out and I want to get a PhD D in English like some members of my home community would just laugh at me like what what's the point of that right? So it can be a vulnerable thing to say what you really want to do but the only way you can really get help and really connect with people around your passions is to tell almost everybody like here's what I'm really interested in. Here are the questions that I have. here's the the life I imagine for myself and that's really how um and you will find that unlike what your fears may tell you that somebody is going to laugh at you most of the time you are going to get oh that's really interesting let me talk with you about it a little bit more >> I think another way is through uh national societies for these are essentially clubs um that students run uh that have chapters at universities, right? One example for me is the Society of Hispanic Professional and Engineership. They they're a national u branch that helps advocate for uh students that have this affinity for engineering and for just all types of STEM across the country. And every year they'll have regional and national conventions where they invite 300 plus engineering firms um from the really big local national and international global tech companies to like small local regional tech firms and startups and all they do is help you network and coach and learn and um that's a great way to kind of build alliances and relationships as well. And I bring up SHIP because it's just one, right? It's it's just one there. There are hundreds of of different societies. There's the Society for Women Engineering. There's the Society for African-Americans in STEM. Like, there are so many that if you just Google, you'll find that they usually have a chapter in your institution, which means that there's someone that has a relationship with the national chapter. So, I think this is a great way to kind of build on that as well. I'm going to tell you a story that um actually has a lot of resonance and meaning because it's about one of the students that I have been a long-term mentor for. Um this is a student who is a um international student from Brazil. His name is Paulo. And um he came to see me in my office hours during the first week of classes because he was trying to um register for my English class but accidentally registered for um a class with the same number but in the econ department. And he went to that class and on that first day of taking that course he he's like what is this? This is not English. this is economics. But he stayed for the lecture and was fascinated. It was the first time he had ever taken a course in economics and and he was fascinated because he's like, "Wow, I'm starting to understand or have a new understanding of the way that the world works that I've never seen before." And he got excited. And then he started talking to everybody about like, "Wow, like economics is so cool." Other people picked up on his um uh enthusiasm for this new thing that he was learning even though he was not by no means any kind of expert in it yet. He was just a first year student, but he had faculty members who picked up on how excited he was. And so he talked to them during office hours and he talked about he was vulnerable and he talked about his own story come growing up as a student in Brazil and and how not having this financial knowledge that he was getting in his education really affected him and he wish he'd had that knowledge. And in one of those conversations with one of his faculty members, the faculty member said, "Hey, I actually know someone in the government in Brazil who is concerned about these questions, too. Um, and you're going back for the summer. I'm going to connect you." So he got this amazing um uh internship working with the Brazilian government where he ended up um creating a financial literacy curricula for um for essentially middle school students in Rio de Janeiro that turned into his research project for his senior um thesis. like a lot of students have to do like a a senior project at the end of their um education. Um he then leveraged that senior project into the writing sample uh for his application to graduate school and he is now a PhD economist. All of that came from two things. one being open to something new and two telling everybody this is what I'm interested in even though he had no idea what he was doing. So Rudy, I think one of the most challenging things for our students, especially if they're like new to college or new to an institution, um, is taking that first step of asking to meet with a professor or other staff member that they think would make a good mentor. >> I think you're right. >> Um, so I think it might be helpful just to kind of like practice it, right? and we just show a model of like how would you ask a professor um to meet with you. >> Uh so in this scenario, the way that I structure my emails is that I want it to be very easy for the instructor to find the email because I have no idea how they manage their inbox. And part of what I do is I always uh will notate the class number uh the ask if it's office hours and then I put my name in the subject line, right? I think that's just a fair and consistent way of them getting an email on my behalf. So, in this scenario, I'm just going to say that this is a fictional class called computer science 465. Um, office hours for Rudy Cordderero. I don't have an expectation that they know my full name, but ideally when we're reaching out to them, um, I think it's important that they can just find me quickly if they lose me in their inbox. Mhm. >> I think something that's important is that uh just as a sign of respect that we call um instructors and deans and professors by the title that they have. Um I find that in many cases over time at some point they might say, "Hey, just call me Karen." Right? >> U but and that's totally fine if that's I I will always defer to whatever an instructor prefers that I call them. But until then and until I'm corrected, I go by that title. So for you, I would say uh dear Dean and then I would go by your last name. I do not go by first. >> Nope. >> Um you want to be very respectful and say, "Hey, dear Den Gosling." And then I make sure that um at the very end I always signal with all the best. I believe in brevity when it comes to the email. That means my first uh very short paragraph, one or two sentences is my introduction of who I am and why I'm sending this email, how I'm related to them in this email. The second will be what the ask is, what am I hoping to get out of u office hours, if they are scheduled as they are in the syllabus. And then the third is just a a grateful note of where I thank them for their time and consideration and um and just even considering this request. I think that's the most effective way of having uh this initial conversation. So, my name is Rudy Corddero. I am an undergraduate candidate in your computer science 465 course. Um, I am hoping hoping to connect with you during your scheduled office hours next week. And this is where I'll place the ask um and get some feedback on course direction and um maybe there's a second part if there's something else that you're hoping to get on uh so let's say in this example I'm hoping to learn how to be a ULA, an undergraduate learning assistant. So, I'm hoping to get some feedback on course direction and how I can apply for future ULA roles. So, quick correction. Um, I understand that your time is valuable and appreciate the attention. As a first year student or I guess if this is an advanced course, as a second or third year student, any guidance is always appreciated. I would appreciate as a faculty member getting this email because one you tell me exactly who you are in the context that you that I know you right so even if I were teaching a really large if this were a large lecture course I would still okay this is somebody in this class a you're telling me that you would like to meet with me during scheduled office hours and some students are might say but office hours aren't you just supposed to drop in well yeah you can but it's helpful for me as a very busy faculty member to say Oh, you know, I I can plan, hey, I know at least 15 minutes of my time during those office hours is going to be spent with Rudy Cordderero. And then that lets me if I have other students coming in, it lets me sort of prepare and organize my time. >> Perfect. >> So, that's great. I mean, the other thing I would say is because you're addressing me both formally and you're saying, "Hey, I really appreciate your time." I will remember you as a polite person who has regard for me. And already even in just this email, you're starting to establish that trust relationship because you're recognize, you know, it's not just that you're asking for something, but that you're also recognizing that, hey, I'm a busy professor and that this is kind of a favor, you know, even though, [clears throat] you know, we all do office hours as professors. Um, and it just the tone is nice and so I'm gonna remember you even if I have, you know, two 200 people in my class. Okay, let's be honest. The most common goal for going [music] to college is to find a good professional job after graduating. The job you get immediately after graduation, [music] it's just your first job. You are highly likely to have two, three, or even more very different careers in your lifetime. So take a breath and stop putting so much pressure on yourself to [music] find that one single perfect job when you graduate from college. The path will not be linear. We've invited Rudy back to the studio to discuss all the experiences that shaped his career so far. By the end of this module, I hope you'll feel relieved and prepared. You will know that you don't need the perfect road map right now. You can take action by identifying your strengths, making meaningful connections, and building resilience as you work towards your goals. Most universities still, unless you're going into a pre-professional program like a nursing program or a technical program, um are are liberal arts colleges, and there isn't necessarily a very direct relationship between what you're studying and the job that you that you're going to get after graduation. Often there is, but not always. And and it's like it's more common than people think that you might study something in college that enriches you, that gives you a knowledge base, that gives you certain kinds of skills like writing or quantitative skills, but it doesn't determine what you're necessarily going to be doing in the future, right? It's they're transferable skills, but just because you're using those skills in one area doesn't mean you can't transfer those skills to another area that um will be enable you to get really wonderful employment after you graduate. And >> I think it's important to state that uh regardless of the type of major whether it's li purely liberal arts or purely STEM, I think it's safe to say that employers as a whole are looking for certain types of distinctive qualities. Do you collaborate well? uh do you communicate effectively? Um could they see you in a leadership position? And sometimes as a student when you just got to college your first semester, you're like, I don't how do I even build these skills, right? Like don't I need a job to build these skills? And to some extent, yes. But I think what's also important to note is that um so much of this also is a learning process that you get to earn and build in extracurricular activities, clubs that you're really interested in, right? If you really care about, you know, the glee club, it's something that you care about, you can earn leadership skills there and like working with, you know, your glee club's board and and helping organize things. And these are great examples where these are softer skills that you can develop such that when you are applying for these different roles, you have a more competitive resume. >> Yeah. And extracurriculars are a great place to do that. But also, you can get this just from the classes that you're taking, right? like how many times do you know have you had a group project that you've had to help manage? How do you do that collaboration? Right? Maybe you've done a research paper that's somewhat connected to the field or not, but that you know that experience of having done research, you know, a a research paper shows that you can organize information that you know maybe you were looking in an archive that had never been looked at before or something like that. like you um you can build the school those skills, you know, especially even for those those folks for whom it's harder to do extracurricular activities. Maybe you have a full-time job, maybe you have family responsibilities, those skills can also be built in the classroom. >> What are those intangible skills um or soft people also call them soft skills that you feel like you have learned and I know you you are actively on the job market right now, right? like where do you see in your college experience that you've been able to develop those um skills and how are they sort of supporting you as you're going through the job process right now? >> Yeah, that's a great one. Um I think that I think that communicating effectively is a challenge. Like it's it's very easy for me to talk about last night's sports game if we both saw it together cuz we saw it together, right? But if I if I'm working in a research lab and my job is now to collaborate with a different student or instructor um on a marginal topic that's slightly relatable, I have to be able to develop these skills where I can explain it um in a way that makes it relatable to you but also isn't overbearing. And I find that these skills really get developed when you're kind of going out of your way to like work with an instructor, uh work with a department, get feedback from it. And I think getting feedback be learning to become a little bit receptive to it is um an exceptional experience that you can have as a student because the reality is that the risks are so low but the benefits are so high. You know when we're growing up we we learn about getting feedback as in these are the things that you did wrong and this is how you need to correct it. And I think if we just switch the framing on it a little bit we would take it as an opportunity to think okay how can I grow in this specific topic? Um, and academically the risk is just lower. They're hoping that you're going to get better, that you're going to become more effective, that you'll be able to share those skills with a different student that's slightly younger or earlier in their academic path that you are. And I think that's that's one of the better ways to kind of learn that skill. >> And as you pointed out, getting that feedback and responding constructively to that, that is what happens in the work world all the time. >> Yeah. And that and that difference there, right? like we we don't I mean it's called growth right [laughter] like that difference between like okay this is what I did and this is how I how I changed my results and got better results moving forward in a linear algebra class I had an instructor who um was just very vocal and open about just the challenges of the subject itself and she did an amazing job of kind of verbalizing and explaining her own struggles when she was learning the topic at her at the very beginning and she she called it deliberate struggle you have to put yourself in a position where you're going to deliberately struggle as a method of learning this specific topic. And I I that was so impactful for me because it was that the beginning of my like career mathematic path at Yale where I was just like wow can I do this right and and it meant a lot to me. >> I'd love to learn what other support systems do you think are frequently overlooked. Um well you've talked about one of them which is faculty right yes many faculty have been academics their whole lives but you know faculty yes they're teaching in the in you know towards the students but they are also engaging in a wider world of research. They are they're paying attention to what's going on outside the university as well as what's happening within the university. Not all of them but most of them. And so they may have contacts that you don't you never know about that you can you know if you can you mention to somebody hey I'm thinking about going to graduate school do you think it's a good idea like you were saying or you know I've always wanted to be an editor >> but I don't know I don't know any editors do you know anybody who does this work and they were like well I had a great editor on my last academic book that came out um maybe you could talk to that person right so there are opportunities. So faculty members often know and they certainly know about fellowships um you know research experiences for undergraduates. Um many of them you know know what that landscape is and can help connect you with that. You know volunteering a lot of us come to college and we're like we want to give back. Volunteering is one of the more popular extracurricular activities on campus. So and it's often an extracurricular that connects you with the community. So talk to those community partners often, especially if you know you are local or you want to stay stay in the university community for the summer. Maybe you have an opportunity to stay in one of the dorms over the summer or house set for a professor or something like that and you want a job in the community. those community partnerships that you're you're developing as a volunteer and also volunt you know often these volunteer experiences they are with people from all different walks of life and maybe you will meet somebody who um has an interesting job that you're like oh I want to learn more about that and then extracurricular networks and alumni of course there are extracurriculars that are focused on um careers but there are also just extracurriculars for fun where you get to meet a huge range of people And maybe sometimes you're having just a casual conversation and they turn you on to an opportunity you didn't even know existed. And finally, I think the most underused resource really is um the alumni from the university. Many many universities have an alumni directory and where alumni kind of like check a little box and say I'm open to having students reach out to me and they publish the email that you can you could email that and you were describing like you could send a cold email to an alumnist who you know is in a similar field to you or works at the at the place that you want to work and you can just send them you know and and you can get coaching from the career services or from a another student who's done this before. send them a cold email saying, "Hi, this is what my name is. This is what my major is. I go to the same college that you went to, and I love it here. Um, and I'd be excited to talk to you about your job doing X." And again, these alumni love giving back. Um, and they're more than happy to if they've checked that box, yeah, share my my contact info. They'll be willing to spend 15 minutes on Zoom telling you about their job and and giving you advice. getting into the practice of trying to articulate for yourself and sometimes um a mentor or a career services advisor can can really help when you start with your strengths. What is it that you are really good at doing? And again, it doesn't have to be just the academics. It could be, you know, like for me in in my field, um being a strong communicator, being able to write well, being able to listen, you know, that those are really key skills. And for me to sit down with someone and and this is hard for people to do like people, it's easy for them to be like, I can't do this, I can't do that, I can't do that. The harder thing, but the more important thing is to say, these are what my strengths are. But if you start with those strengths um and then get more comfortable talking about what those strengths are and and again, college gives you all these safe places to do that. And the other thing is getting over the idea that you have to like if you see um a internship position or a job posting and it has all these qualifications, you do not have to have all of those qualifications to actually get the job. But if the job is interesting to you or the internship is interesting to you and you have some of those and you show an ability to learn and to be to grow, often the employer is going to be like, "Okay, you have the foundation. It's okay that you don't check all these boxes. I will help you learn those skills. I'm going to pick somebody who shows that they are willing to collaborate, are willing to listen, are responsible, and reliable." Um, and those are the characteristics that I'm looking for versus, yeah, there might be somebody who has all of the skills that we already need, but if that person doesn't show up on time, can't communicate well with other team members, that's not the person I want to hire. >> And that doesn't mean that there aren't fellowships or internships or specific summer roles that aren't extremely competitive. Of course, there are going to be. Um, what I'm saying is apply to all of them, not just those hyper competitive ones. Exactly. Exactly. Because there are plenty of programs that may be very niche or are looking for a particular skill set that those students that you know maybe they've got those straight A's but they've taken a really well-beaten path and maybe you have some skills or some experiences that that work for that particular fellowship or that particular internship. Um and you never know if you don't try. Uh the same way the office of career services has uh a subscription email blast that will give you information on all um the different types of roles that are being advertised for you for our specific students. uh the computer science department is doing the same, but like the difference is that they're having speakers come to campus um or even through Zoom and talk about a specific field or problem or research question that they're working on. And then those instructors or those um those members of industry will say, "Hey, here's my contact. Reach out if you have any interest or if you just want to learn more." And I think something that's been amazing for me is that I've used that as an opportunity to learn more about them and their industry and how how they measure successful candidates and not as a way of saying this is my name, can I get a job? Right? I think what's really important there is that um they're they become um unofficial mentors in your journey about of how do I learn to navigate this space instead of the barrier for getting you that job next time. >> Yeah. >> And there's also events don't forget about the alumni, >> right? So the alumni are people all the whole like tens of thousands of people who in the past have graduated from your your institution and are now out in the working world and they come back to the university because they want to give back and their way of giving back is sometimes meeting with students at networking events or again giving presentations or coming to career fairs. Um and sometimes students are like well why would this person want to talk to me? No they're coming to talk to you. They want to again a lot of them are motivated by paying it forward right they got so much out of this institution they want you know and so taking time to actually go to that career fair even if you're not looking for a job and and what you said earlier about like when you talk to a mentor it's not like here's my resume let's you know do you have a job for me and it's all a lot lot of those informal conversations that create a network so as you said later on they will know you and when an opportunity comes up, they will reach out to you and say, "Hey, you know, we've had some really great conversations over the last year and it's not like you have to talk to them every day." Like it could be two conversations, right? Or Yeah. And and and you send sending thank you emails after each conversation and that is enough for them to be like, "Oh, wait. I remember when I was at, you know, my university, I had a great conversation with this student. We we touched base via email. I think that student might be a great candidate for this position or this internship. Use the time that you have to do some personal financial planning. You know, like if you're going to go into this field, how much can you expect to make in your first two or three years? Often the what you make in the first two or three years, um it's not going to determine what you're going to make later on in your career. There's not like sort of a a a straight slowly increasing exponential number. Often for many kinds of jobs that you get right out of college, you sort of like work at a lower level for a little bit and then you jump up a level >> and then you jump up another level, right? And so it it ends up looking a little bit more like one of those like mountain lines rather than as like just a slow steady incline. It looks like a mountain range instead of a single mountain. >> [snorts] >> Yeah. Um, so that's one thing to think about, but do some educa like what like one of the things actually we do have programming here at Yale um where we talk about the financial future and one of the things that they talk about is like sort of what what lifestyle are you expecting to have right out of college, right? Or that do you feel like is going to be make you feel comfortable enough? Okay. then align your your career choices with what that expectation is. I mean, you know, we we've talked a lot about how, you know, I work a lot with with with students who are first in their families or low-income students, and I definitely have this conversation sometimes with students because they feel torn, right? The purpose of going to college is to be able to have a solid financial future for themselves and often for their families, right? thinking about helping parents in retirement, thinking about helping to support the siblings that follow them through college, right? Um, and so talking about those kinds of expectations and those life goals earlier are going to help you find the kind of role that you want. Yeah, I I think you put it pretty well when you stated like think about the life experience that you want to have followed by the decisions that you need to make to get there, >> right? Ideally, on top of everything that you're learning throughout your college experience, you're also um adding financial literacy, right? And that may not be in a formal course that you take in the economics department, but you you want to set yourself up uh for success because you know an education is an investment uh that you're taking on yourself um either through time or financially. And if you're out there um going to attend a graduate program, that's an additional investment that you're going to make. and you want to understand what the benefits andor consequences would be of these specific types of investments. >> So whatever you end up I think again one of the things one of one of the common misconceptions that students have and they put too much pressure on themselves. They think, okay, this is like I need to find the perfect major that's going to lead me to the perfect industry or the perfect kind of job and then that's going to make me happy for the rest of my life. And a that's not how the world works. And b you're more you're you know the job that you get out of college is just the first job you get out of college, right? It doesn't it you know it sets you on uh a path but that path is going to fork you know in multiple ways in often when you least expect it right maybe it is that unexpected layoff right that no matter how awesome you are the the company you're working for is just making cuts and your job is being eliminated and you have to change and pivot um or you you get into an industry and at first like this is actually you know, this this is what happened to my my own husband. Like, he really loved the industry that he he he was in, but he reached a point where he wasn't moving forward. And he's the type of person who always needs new challenges. And so, he he switched, you know, industries because he needed a fresh challenge. You know, it's a little cliche, but it really is the journey as much as the destination. Um and so a great way to prepare for thinking about what jobs you want is like well what experiences do I want to have? >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think um at least for me like those have opened doors that I never would have expected, right? Like I in one role um I was head of marketing for a pretty large firm and and not specifically the marketing strategies that we work with but just like the procurement process and that you know accidentally led me to travel in Latin America and in Europe, the Middle East and Africa like visiting factories and the processes of how and why we bought certain materials. Um, but at no point when I submitted that application did I have any idea that this would be part of my day-to-day 18 months from that role. Right? >> Most of the people listening to or watching this are going to have very diff like two or three or more very different careers in their lifetimes, right? Um and and so that experience of trying something out, finding the thing that makes you excited about it and then pursuing that further, that's going to happen to people multiple times over their their working lives. >> Yeah. Yeah. We just call that resilience. >> Yeah. >> Or like, hey, you have to learn to become resilient. Like our um I had the one of the most impactful classes I had on campus ever was a marketing class. like in what world would I have taken that on my own? I it was it was quoteunquote forced on me. It was it's and I loved it. And at the end he was like, "All of you are brilliant in your own ways. You all have different backgrounds. Some are from the medical school, some are from the law school, some are from the computer science department. Like I'm at S Soom." And he's just like, "Look, I can guarantee you all that you're going to have horrible days in the future." He's like, "You're He" He's like, "All of you at some point in your life are going to get laid off." and it's not going to be fair and it's not going to be be planned and you're going to take a financial hit and it's going to feel like the most terrifying moment of your life because it might be like it might genuinely be. He's like the point there is to stop, breathe, accept like feeling the despair is normal and okay. He's like that's a human moment. He's like embrace the human moment. He's like but you have to learn to be resilient and get up and go at it again. And I think that's the thing about going to college is that it's a structure that requires you to change, right? That doesn't mean that you like give up your values. It doesn't mean that you change your personality completely, but universities and colleges are designed to help you change and grow. And that's the great strength of them. And and that's true in both the academic sense and in this career sense. >> [music] [music]