When I first started blogging in 2007, I needed web hosting. I noticed that Merlin Mann had a note on 43 Folders about his happiness working with a company named A2 Hosting. That was good enough for me: I signed up for their introductory package.
That was five years ago and I’ve been nothing but happy with their service ever since. Now, in a nice bit of circularity, they’ve agreed to sponsor Study Hacks in much the same way they were sponsoring 43 Folders back when I got started with blogging.
Speaking of recommendations, I have one more to make. An important segment of my readers is community college students. I like these students because they are often way more pragmatic than their counterparts at four year institutions. They see school as an investment and want to get the most out of the money they put in, and therefore they tend to focus more on the nitty-gritty of their strategies (which I enjoy) and less on whether their major is their passion (which I don’t enjoy).
Anyway, a shortcoming of my student writing is that I’ve never done systematic studies of community college students, so my advice in this area is somewhat tentative.
This is why I am happy to enthusiastically recommend Isa Adney’s new book: Community College Success.
If you’re in community college and are looking for advice tailored to your specific setting, Isa’s book is a great place to start.
If you’re interested in my Career Craftsman philosophy, you will find a lot of relevant in Ben’s book, where he shows how to apply to your own career the tactics that help Silicon Valley start-ups succeed. (You can read an annotated list of chapters here.)
A reporter from a major national newspaper is looking to interview people about their experiences with “passion.”
In more detail, he’s looking for the following two types of people:
Those who set out to follow their passion and were disappointed.
Those who discovered the more complicated reality of how people actually end up loving what you do (for example…)
If either (or both) describes you, and you’re interested in being interviewed for a major national newspaper, e-mail me a brief summary of your story at author [at] calnewport.com and put “[Interview]“ in the subject line. (I’m interested in reading your stories as well.)
As a side note, it’s nice to see that the skepticism about passion that we’ve expressed for years here on Study Hacks is starting to gain traction…
A reader recently sent me a link to this fascinating Reddit thread. It’s titled:”I’m not as smart as I thought I was,” and it features a high school senior worried that his intellectual abilities are lacking.
Over 700 people wrote comments in response. One of the top comments was from an MIT graduate who had struggled with and then overcame similar feelings of inadequacy when he first arrived in Cambridge.
Below, I’ve reproduced key passages from his note (edited slightly), as I think he has something important to say — for both students and graduates — about the psychological complexity of the quest to become so good they can’t ignore you…
The people who fail to graduate from MIT, fail because they come in, encounter problems that are harder than anything they’ve had to do before, and not knowing how to look for help or how to go about wrestling those problems, burn out.
The students who are successful, by contrast, look at that challenge, wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and stupidity, and then begin to take steps hiking that mountain, knowing that bruised pride is a small price to pay for getting to see the view from the top. They ask for help, they acknowledge their inadequacies. They don’t blame their lack of intelligence, they blame their lack of motivation.
During my freshman year, I almost failed out of differential equations. I was able to recover and go on to be very successful in my studies. When I was a senior, I would sit down with the freshmen in my dorm and show them the same things that had been shown to me, and I would watch them struggle with the same feelings, and overcome them. By the time I graduated MIT, I had become the person I looked up to when I first got in.
You feel like you are burnt out or that you are on the verge of burning out, but in reality you are on the verge of deciding whether or not you will burn out. It’s scary to acknowledge that it’s a decision because it puts the onus on you to to do something about it, but it’s empowering because it means there is something you can do about it.
I don’t accept paid advertisements. I do, however, have a standing offer to write an honest post about a student-related product if I like it and the company is willing to donate to a charity of my choice. (See here for more details.)
Mind mapping is a method of visually organizing connected ideas, tasks, and information. It has been embraced by many students, for example, as a way to structure information from a class to make it easier to understand and recall (e.g., as explained in this article by Scott Young).
The reason I’ve been slow to suggest this strategy is that mind maps are hard to draw well by hand (you inevitably run out of room) and much of the early software I encountered was too clunky for inclusion in a streamlined study system.
MindMaple has solved these problems. Its interface is perfectly intuitive and uncluttered (especially if you’re using a tablet) allowing you to create beautiful maps quick. You can then export them to any number of formats. The video at the top of the post shows what I mean.
Conclusion: If you’re interested in mind mapping, you need to check out Mind Maple.
Excuse this abuse of the blog for personal reasons, but…
I’m looking for a computer science PhD student for next fall.
If you’re planning on graduate school, and want to make an impact with your research, and are interested in learning firsthand the Cal Newport approach to work and life, contact me at my Georgetown address: cnewport [at] cs.georgetown.edu
You can find out more about my work here and see past publications here.
I don’t accept paid advertisements. I do, however, have a standing offer to write a short, honest post about a student-oriented product if the company is willing to donate to a charity of my choice. (See here for more details.)
Citelighter recently took me up on my offer by donating money to Bottom Line, a great Boston-based organization that helps more students get access to college. I spent a morning looking over the Citelighter product, and here’s what I liked…
I have a high threshold for integrating technology into my study processes because I find that most services are more trouble to setup and use than sticking with a simpler low-tech alternative. Citelighter is one of the few technologies that passes my threshold.
In short, it allows you to highlight any text you can view in your browser and then stores it along with the relevant citation. If it can’t find all of the information it needs for the citation, it asks you to fill in what’s missing. (Once anyone has filled in the missing information, however, everyone benefits.)
Must crucially, this works for Google Books (click the plain text link to get the text you’re viewing into a highlightable form).
When you’re done, you can export all the citations you found into whatever format you want. (Word, Google Docs, etc.)
Bottom line: I hate how much time goes into tracking down and formatting citations. For many students, this service will help.
Speaking of major national newspapers, a reporter I know from one such publication wrote me recently and asked the following:
“I’m trying to get in touch with current students or recent graduates whose parents went to Ivy League schools — and they didn’t, either because they didn’t want to apply or they didn’t get in.”
If this describes you and you’re interested in being interviewed, you can contact her directly at pamela [at] pamelapaul.com.
I'm a 29-year-old computer scientist interested in why some people lead successful, enjoyable, meaningful lives, while so many others do not. Being a geek, I'm not satisfied with simplistic slogans (e.g., "follow your passion!") or conventional wisdom (e.g., student success requires stress). Instead, I dive deeper, looking to decode underlying patterns of success, in all their nuanced glory.
