Study Hacks

A Common Query

Earlier this fall I received an e-mail from a rising freshman at Yale. It read, in part:

As college draws nearer, I am growing increasingly concerned about what I’m going to do with my life.

Most of the people around me seem to think that the safest route for me is to go pre-med, because it is a well-defined path that leads to a stable career.

The thing is, I don’t really want to do pre-med. But I don’t know what else I want to do with my life. What should I do?

I get this question enough that I thought it worthwhile to share my response (put into bullet point format for readability). I’m hoping the new college students among you will find something relevant here…

My Response

• Don’t go pre-med.
• Instead: table the question of your future until the start of your sophomore year.
• During your freshman year, take core courses and use your leftover electives to sample more exotic subjects. Try out a few activities to find out which seem interesting and, more importantly, which offer the most compelling opportunities to someone willing to pay it a lot of attention.
• Then, at the start of your sophomore year, make some choices: Choose one major (not two, not three). Choose one or two extracurricular areas to focus on (not three, not four). Then attack these small number of things with a large amount of time and attention. Become excellent at them.
• At this point, put aside any doubts about whether you made the right choices. Always move forward. Never look back and wonder.
• As you know, I don’t believe in pre-existing passions. In my experience, there is no right or wrong major or activity waiting out there for you to discover. There are, however, right or wrong reasons for pursuing something.
• Motivational psychology tells us that what matters in a pursuit is the loci of control. If you’re going after something because you sampled it and you found it interesting, that’s a good enough reason for your mind to get on board and provide the motivation and engagement you need for a good, successful student career.  If you’re going after something only because “most of the people” around you thought it sounded safe, that is, from a psychological point of view, a disastrous reason. You’re in for unhappiness at best and deep procrastination at worst.

To summarize: First take some time to see what’s out there, second make your own choices (but don’t sweat them), and then third go big without reservations.

(Photo by CanWeBowlPlease)

The Irrepressible Erez

If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to return for the moment to my obsession with Erez Lieberman. As you might recall, Lieberman is a rising star in the science world. He’s currently a fellow at Harvard’s elite Society of Fellows and a visiting faculty member at Google. He was selected for the Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 list, his work has been featured on the front page of the The New York Times, and the NIH just gave him a $2.5 million New Innovators grant.

When Lieberman’s stint as a Harvard fellow is over, he’ll have his choice of academic positions.

In other words, Erez Lieberman is remarkable, and this makes him interesting to us — not just those of us who happen to be grad students or professors, but to anyone who is interested in my Career Craftsman philosophy, which posits that becoming so good they can’t ignore you is the foundation for building a working life you love.

With all this in mind, I thought it useful to dive deeper into Lieberman’s story and see what insights I could uncover…

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A reader asked me this question recently. Here’s what I told him:

• Yes, but it feels different in grad school than earlier in your student career.
• It’s about being able to focus intensely on what matters — mastering the parts of your field most relevant to your research — and not getting bogged down by everything else.
• It’s about being able say: “I worked hard on something that matters this afternoon, now I’m done, let’s go find some good beer.”
• It’s about being able to fall off the radar of people handing out time-consuming busy work, then popping back up suddenly and saying: “I just did something important. Again.”
• Grad school done right is hard work, but also quite Zen — not in a sitting back and relaxing sort of way, but in a minimalist, focused, Shaolin Monk, living life with crystal clear clarity and few complications sort of way.

David had his epiphany not long after hiking an erupting volcano in the Fimmvörðuháls pass of southern Iceland. (Pictured above.)

At the time, he was a masters student spending a semester working with a team of seismologists.

He was also trying to figure out what to do with his life.

“I came full-circle on this issue of building an exciting life,” he told me. “I ultimately rejected the low-cost, Internet-based cash-flow business model that Tim Ferriss and others advocate as the silver bullet.”

To understand what he meant, you must first understand that David loved his time in Iceland. He developed a close group of friends and “spent evenings socializing, partying, exploring, and weekends hiking.” He climbed volcanoes and bathed in hot springs. He got to work with world class researchers solving interesting problems in beautiful locations.

“It broke my heart to leave,” he said.

David realized that an academic path could offer the exotic travel and flexibility promoted by lifestyle design gurus such as Ferriss, while also providing a sense of engagement and intellectual stimulation that would be hard to match on one’s own.

So on returning to the States, he decided to continue into his school’s PhD program. His first step, true to his desire to create an interesting life, was to “apply to every fellowship under the sun.” He won an NSF award to research in Japan, where his work on earthquake prediction had suddenly taken on a renewed sense of importance.

“My long-term goals aren’t clear yet,” he told me.  “But I hope to place myself in a position where I can choose a nice place to live after the doctorate.  Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, New York, and California are all on the list.”

The Lessons of David

What interests me about David’s story is that it’s relevant to both my student and my career advice.

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An Adventurous Academic Alcove

Alex’s trouble started with a mathematics course. Something about the material just didn’t click.

“I grew to to dislike the course so much that I could stare at the problem set for hours and get nowhere,” she told me.

Then she came up with a solution:

The image above was taken from the roof of the science center at Alex’s university. This is where she started to take her math homework — usually late at night.

She was definitely not supposed to be up there, but she went anyway — and for good reason.

“I would slip out onto the roof, and go to a little protected alcove I discovered. There was a roof light that lit the area and I had a nice place to sit” she said.

“The total isolation and silence, the total lack of distractions, the novelty of the location, the limited time: it made these sessions really excellently productive.”

The Return of the Romantic Scholar

Alex’s tactic is an example of what I call adventure studying. I introduced this idea back in 2008, but I’m reintroducing it today as part of my ongoing  series on the Romantic Scholar approach to student life. As you might recall, this series presents tactics for transforming your student experience from a trial to survive and into the foundation of a life well-lived.

Adventure studying, as Alex discovered, is a fantastic strategy for advancing this goal. The antiseptic library and distressed dorm lounge are so burdened with cultural significance — studying is hard, boring, tedious work — they make it near impossible to reimagine your academic experience.

Change the context, however, and you gain freedom from these signifiers. Study by a waterfall or at a quiet pub, and you take back control decisions about what role your school work plays in your life.

Keep this strategy in mind as the new semester lurks closer. Tackling your assignments can be a sublime experience, but it’s up to you to make this happen.

Just don’t let the janitor see you sneaking up the fire escape.

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This post is the fifth in my series on the Romantic Scholar approach to student life, which details a collection of strategies to transform school from a trial to survive into the foundation of a life well-lived.

Past articles:

• Learning to Love your AP History Assignments: How to Hack the Science of Student Motivation
• The Roberts Method: A Professor’s Advice for Falling in Love with Your Major
• How Double Majors Can Ruin Your Life
• The Romantic Scholar: A New Approach to Student Life

Start things earlier than you think you need to, aim to finish them well before they’re due.

If you want to produce great work, and really enjoy your life while doing so, I’m yet to find a strategy that works better.

Longtime readers of Study Hacks know I have a simple philosophy for students: do less, but do what you do really well. This pattern of success is astoundingly effective. It produces superstars — the type who have their pick of post-graduation employment. It also produces a low-stress and meaningful student life.

Every once and a while I like to share examples of this Zen Valedictorian strategy in action, just to remind my student readers what school could be like.

A nice case study arrived in my inbox this morning from a University of California student. His message was titled: “The Benefits of Being a Newportian.”

“I major in Earth Systems Science,” he told me, “and I implemented my interpretation of your Zen philosophy: extreme underscheduling of classes (a conservative 12-15 units per semester) and focusing on becoming really, really good at one thing — marine science.”

“This last semester I was in lab 25-30 hours a week, voraciously reading papers related to my field, and discussing them with my advisor. This lead to a fellowship which resulted in a publication of which I am co-first author.”

“Your philosophies allowed me to publish this paper, get a 3.8 GPA, spend almost every night with my kick-ass girlfriend, and sleep plenty. I don’t know another science student less stressed than me.”

As you contemplate your double major and overloaded course schedule and nineteen extracurricular activities, remember this example. The most exceptional students are not the most busy; they’re the most focused.

They’re also the students heading over to see their girlfriend while you settle into the library for yet another all-nighter.

Posts on my Zen Philosophy in College:

• My Romantic Scholar Series
• How to Become a Zen Valedictorian
• Zen Valedictorian Case Studies
• The Study Hacks Philosophy of College

Posts on my Zen Philosophy in High School:

• Want to Get into Harvard? Spend More Time Staring at the Clouds
• How Could we Save this Ridiculously Overscheduled Grind?
• How to Be a High School Superstar (my popular book about students who get into good colleges while avoiding high school stress)

The Deep Procrastination Crisis

Above is a snapshot of my blog e-mail inbox, filtered to only show e-mails from students struggling with deep procrastination. Notice that there are close to 60 such messages. If I include blog comments in the search, the number jumps into the hundreds.

Deep procrastination is a distressing affliction. Students who suffer from it lose the ability to start school work. Deadlines pass and they hand nothing in. Professors provide special extensions, but the students still can’t bring themselves to do the work. And so on.

As evidenced by my inbox, this issue is surprisingly common, especially at elite colleges. Yet it’s also almost entirely off the radar of traditional student counseling, which is why I dedicate time to it here.

In my previous post, I introduced a dubious evolutionary explanation for an otherwise very real phenomenon: procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don’t have a believable plan for succeeding at what you’re trying to do. In this post, as promised, I want to apply this evolutionary perspective to help better understand, and therefore better combat, the deep variety of this common issue.

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