Study Hacks

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:

1. Those who set out to follow their passion and were disappointed.
2. 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 Reddit Gem

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.

So do 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.)

MindMaple, the makers of an exceptional piece of mind mapping software, 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.

Intuitive, Elegant Mind Mapping Software…

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.

This video explains things better than I can…

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.

Last night I went to a book launch party. It was held at 826 DC, a fantastic youth tutoring non-profit  that oozes with hipster whimsy.

Appropriately, the author we were celebrating, Marina Koestler Ruben, is an educator. Her book is titled: How to Tutor Your Own Child.

I read an advance copy, and it’s good; the type of book that will continue to sell for years and years because it offers solutions to a universal problem:  how to be useful when your child struggles with school work. Also, unlike many advice guides, it’s actually well written, which likely owes much to Marina’s writing degree.

There was, however, a bigger point that struck me as I listened last night to Marina talk about adopting the parent-tutor lifestyle: achieving this goal is not obvious.

Do you know, for example, the six steps that define a quality tutoring session, or when to make the shift from parental to professional help? I didn’t.

Tutoring, it turns out, is a craft.

This brings me back to an argument that I made obliquely in my recent post on the case method for defeating procrastination: the more ambitious among us like to take action toward our goals, but we don’t necessarily want to put much time into figuring out which actions we should be taking.

When our children struggle with their homework, we’re quick to dive in and offer advice, but how many look to the Marina’s of the world to first figure out how to do so effectively?

In other words, if you’re on homework patrol in your household, buy this book. If you’re not, buy into the broader lesson it exemplifies: taking action and taking the right action can be two very different things.

Excuse this brief diversion from my normal post schedule: I want to clear out some administrative notes that have been piling up…

Note #1: I’m Moving to Georgetown

My long-stated goal of becoming a “genial advice-spewing professor” is finally coming to fruition: this fall I’m starting as an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University.

Two points related to this move:

1. Study Hacks will Continue. My role as a professor should provide interesting new insights for my student-centric posts, and having a “real job” for the first time in my life should provide needed nuance to my career-centric posts.
2. Come Work With Me. If you’re a rising senior or a masters student studying computer science, and you have an interest in applying distributed algorithm theory to exciting new problems, and you’re thinking about pursuing a doctorate: drop me a note. I’ll be recruiting my first PhD students soon. Maybe it could be you?

Note #2: I’m Doing a Live Online Interview and Q & A Session Thursday Night at 8PM EDT

The interview is for the Future of Education series, and I’ll be talking about my blue book. You can listen to the interview live and ask questions (click here for details). Hope to see you there.

Note #3: My Article for The 99%

My latest article for The 99 Percent online magazine is live. It talks about my experiments with batching. The moral: batching is a lot harder than people assume…