Sunday, July 12, 2015

Six skills to learn in college


I am planning to hand out the following to my large, general-ed, intro-astronomy-for-non-majors class. What do you think? It doesn't need to be longer, since it's probably too long for many of them to take the time to read. What should I cut?

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Six skills to learn in college

Have you heard the old saying that college is just about getting a fancy piece of paper? This is no longer true. For an education to be worth anything for employment after graduation, students need to learn skills.

No matter what your major, while you are in college, learn these six skills.

(1) Think critically and carefully, which means reason and question.

(2) Read carefully and closely, with good retention.

(3) Find things out by doing serious research. Google and Wikipedia do not count.

(4) Write something that someone might actually want to read.

(5) Become proficient in mathematics. Math is your friend: employers will think you are valuable if you can use mathematics well enough to solve real-world problems. Computers and statistics can help here.

(6) Speak effectively in front of a group of people.


If you graduate without at least three of these skills, you have wasted your time.

This class is too large to help you learn public speaking. It can help you learn the other five skills. You can learn all these skills in most majors.

13 comments:

  1. Nice. I've been telling my upper-division majors that one big task for them at college is to become and expert user of their own brain: figure out what it needs—be that sleep, exercises, good nutrition, stimulation, or quiet solitude—and then to structure their lives so that they get it.

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  2. (3) is an uphill battle for me. Our library subscribes to useful (and expensive) databases, and every semester I set up a training session for my students. Somehow it doesn't stick. BUSINESSBALLS.COM IS NOT AN ACADEMIC SOURCE, PEOPLE!

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    1. Yes. Livestrong.com is also not an academic source, or WedMD, or peta.org...

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  3. The problem with (4) is that it is simply not true that nobody wants to read poor writing and bad ideas. If anything, the general public is probably more likely to read that than some serious academic study. Thanks to the Internet, the available pool of readers has become so large that eventually a number of interested readers will be found for anything. How would you rephrase (4)?

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    1. As a student of rhetoric (or a least someone who poses as such for employment purposes), I'm comfortable with the phrasing of #4. As generations of English majors who supported themselves by writing advertising (and their successors who now write "7 weird tricks" headlines) will tell you, writing doesn't always have to be good to appeal to an audience, but effectively reaching an audience is often what pays. The slightly-less-depressing news is that the same skills that can be used to sell out can also be used (sometimes by the same person, at different times of day/life) to accomplish worthier purposes.

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  4. Replies
    1. That's pretty good, though #3 and #6 may be somewhat at odds (and I wish #6 mentioned sleep as well as food and exercise).

      It also strikes me that #4 is really part of #s 1 and 2 (which are themselves related).

      We could probably have a good separate discussion about the extent to which we agree with this list, and/or how we'd modify it.

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  5. I like it, but I suspect that our old nemeses Dunning and Kruger will kick in. Right off the bat with number one, I think most people are pretty darn sure they think critically, and see no reason to question that opinion of themselves. Ditto for most of the rest. The really hard part is to learn to be comfortable questioning yourself - asking yourself where you might be wrong, and then doing something to become right.

    The exception is probably #5. Math phobia is so socially acceptable that many people are content to remain weak in it.

    I'd maybe rephrase #4 to say something like 'write something that the reader can understand and learn from on the first reading"


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    1. "I think most people are pretty darn sure they think critically, and see no reason to question that opinion of themselves. "

      there seems to be a direct inverse relationship between people claiming they are logical and think critically, and their ability to actually do so.

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  6. When I taught courses to other departments, I was expected to be less rigorous and not so thorough with the material. The reason, I suppose, was that those students didn't need to have a detailed understanding of the concepts as well as maintaining high pass rates.

    When I was an undergrad and took my English and math courses, either the profs treated those courses as a joke because of the aforementioned reasons or they were excessively rigid and the material came across as dry and needlessly complicated or overwhelmingly pedantic. Sessions such as "how to write a technical report", intended to be of help, didn't.

    The unfortunate result was that it took me several years before I finally mastered the art of clear and concise technical writing. Similarly, many of the mathematical concepts didn't make sense until well after I finished my studies and I had the opportunity to look over them.

    Part of that, I'm sure, was my fault for not grasping right away what was being taught. Still, it doesn't let my profs off the hook for often being obscure or haphazard in their presentation.

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  7. This is one of those moments when I wish we had a "like" button, since I agree with most of what's been said above.

    One question (probably related to my own preoccupations more than your purposes, Frod), about #3: as a scientist, how do you feel about referring to reading secondary sources as "research"? One of the things I try to get across to my writing-in-the-disciplines students is that actually, practicing, researchers do not consider the activities in which one engages in order to write a "research paper" to be "research" (or at least considers them to be only the first, preparatory step, toward doing real/original research). It strikes me that one reason (probably of many) that the general public (even the college-educated general public, including, sadly, science/medical journalists) doesn't really understand how scholarly research in the sciences and social sciences works is that they don't understand the difference between an original study and a synthetic/derivative piece, let alone how to evaluate how solid/generalizable the findings of an original study are likely to be. I'm not sure what the solution(s) to that problem are, but it seems to me that using a different word than "research" for reading/synthesizing/perhaps evaluating secondary literature might be a start.

    Or maybe I'm just a crank on this subject.

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    1. I refer to the important reading that you have to do as a "literature search". It does several things for a physical scientist: get you hints on what doesn't work, shows you the limits of currently published work (which you need to know so you know what will be enough to get a paper), gives your back-of-the-enevelope noodling a sanity check, and prepares you to give credit where due.

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    2. That would work, since the main project in my class is a literature review. Of course, getting across the idea of what "literature" means in this context is a whole 'nother struggle.

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