Last Saturday, I joined around forty students and faculty members gathered in the Mathey common room as part of Principedia’s fall Hackademics. The goal? In the words of McGraw Associate Director Nic Voge, sharing what students have learned about the hidden curriculum at Princeton.
Students working hard at the Spring 2015 Hackademics!
Whether or not they call it by name, most students have recognized the “hidden curriculum” of learning expectations and demands behind every Princeton course. I’ve often had to puzzle out the best learning strategies for my classes– from watching MAT 202 video review sessions before exams to talking through principal parts with friends in language classes– by trial and error. Online course evaluations are usually emotionally-charged and of limited help, and professors and TAs don’t always give students concrete advice. Continue reading Principedia: A Wiki for Better Learning!
Last summer, as I’ve mentioned, I researched the interactions between Bermuda’s groundwater and coral reefs. I entered the metaphorical woods: the ambiguity and self-doubt of immersion in data and details.
My mentor, Cleo Chou, taking measurements in the rainforest last summer.
I came to the field with a set of expectations for my project: a conceptual forest, if you will. But in the field, I zoomed in, rebuilding this conceptual forest from the ground up. Surrounded by trees, details, and noise, I lost faith that I could find significant results – any conceptual forest at all.
On Day One of my project, I had an abrupt reality check. The groundwater discharge I was studying was nowhere to be found. I swam along the rocky coastline of Bermuda’s Tynes Continue reading Welcome to the Woods
Have you ever looked at a class syllabus for the first time and been absolutely shocked by the sheer volume of information you are expected to process? This is exactly how I felt when I first saw the syllabus for an urban studies seminar I’m currently taking. The class curriculum is stacked with dense articles, complex lectures and hundred-page textbook readings. How could I possibly manage, retain and use all of that material?
It turns out that that immensely overwhelming syllabus can actually be my best tool for successfully managing my workload.
This is my friend Morgan feeling very overwhelmed by all the material in her textbook, articles and lecture notes. We’ve all been there.
Recently, I attended a McGraw Workshop entitled Efficient Learning Strategies: Managing Large Amounts of Information. This hour-long session focused on exactly what worried me when I looked at my seminar syllabus: how to effectively approach classes that throw vast amounts of information at you. Nic Voge, the Associate Director of the Undergraduate Learning Program, led the workshop and helped the attendees work through common concerns students have about information management. These included being able to discern important information, make connections, summarize material and prepare for assessments—each of which is particularly pertinent for research-based classes and projects. Continue reading Syllabi, Charts and Research Plans: Your Best Friends for Effective Information Management
When I entered Princeton as a freshman, I was skeptical that research could do anything for me. I considered myself an applied person who cared little for theory, and I hadn’t planned on continuing on to graduate school. The tides turned when I stumbled upon an optics Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program when I was looking for summer programs freshman year. At the time I felt I had few marketable technical skills in my major, so I figured it would be a good chance to build up some useful skills and decided to give it a try. And I’m really glad I did — the experience made me realize how wrong I had been about my prior assumptions regarding research.
Are you a research skeptic, too? Let me tell you a bit about my story and why I would recommend giving research a try.
Princeton is known for its small classes, but imagine taking this to the extreme. Last semester, I took SOC 310, Gender and Development in Latin America. Total students: one.
Not all classes fill up a lecture hall!
Following an odd turn of events last spring that saw all other students drop the course, I was handed an incredible opportunity: a one-on-one course crafted around my interests.
Much of the class was dedicated to discussing LGBTQIA themes in Latin America. There’s a lot I could write about, but for the purposes of this blog I will focus on one particular oddity. In several articles, I remember coming across the word “transvestite”. I am a peer educator at Princeton’s LGBT Center, and as I had learned in training, many consider this word to be pejorative and outdated. Shouldn’t a sociologist studying queer issues know better?
You’ve probably heard that research is more of a marathon than a sprint. That’s definitely true — Every independent project involves thorough planning and lots of stamina. But since we’re on the subject of analogies, it’s also true that research is an obstacle course. Think about it: There are challenges built into the research process, and sometimes they’re impossible to avoid. PCUR gets real about these roadblocks in our second Correspondent Convo. Watch below to learn which struggles are most common, and which strategies can help you reach the finish line.
Nothing beats an academic conference in sunny Las Vegas!
I am writing this blog while simultaneously unpacking my suitcase from one of the most eventful weekends of my Princeton career. Where did I go, you ask? Well, this weekend I flew to Las Vegas, Nevada, where I presented a research poster at the annual conference for the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics!
Traveling to attend academic conferences is one of the many perks of being a researcher, and student researchers are no exception. These conferences allow you to expand your understanding of your field or related fields and network with people from around the world. While many students conduct research during their time at Princeton, however, the opportunity to attend and present at an academic conference seems almost illusory. If hectic class schedules and large conference registration fees aren’t enough of a deterrent, the fear of being inadequate/unprepared can quell even the most hopeful Princetonians from submitting their research abstracts to conference committees.
Problem 5 on my problem set was about distributing a pile of stones across vertices of a pentagon.
Creativity is something I’ve struggled with my entire life. Being the son of two architects, I was always expected to develop some sort of creative talent – even at a young age. Sadly, this talent never manifested itself, especially not in building design (I figured that out when my 2nd grade classmates labeled my gingerbread house as the ‘ugliest’ at a holiday party).
I learned very early in my life that I was more of an analytical and methodological person. While I wasn’t creative, I could follow a set of clear-cut instructions. I liked classes like math where everything had definitive answers. I enjoyed playing sports like tennis where mastery of a specific set of techniques defines what it means to be a good player. But when given the freedom to be creative, I used to panic. The music I composed for my piano class sounded awful. My dancing skills were subpar let alone my ability to choreograph. And I couldn’t write creatively no matter how hard I tried.
The doodles appear everywhere: on whiteboards, on lab notebooks, even on the autoclave tape. Impeccably shaded line drawings of a-helices, the protein structure nearly everyone in the lab works with. The “culprit”? Ann, the senior grad student in our lab. Her artistic skill is rare, or at least perceived as rare, in science. Rare enough that Grant, one of the post-docs in the lab, complains, besides a few exceptions, science is “full of nerds”, by which he means those without any creativity or broad interest. And that rarity is a shame, because science needs creativity. This isn’t just about a desire for amusing doodles, it’s about building a scientific community full of clear, intuitive thinkers who can communicate their discoveries.
This isn’t quite what’s usually meant by “biochemistry is more art than science”
Once upon a time, the protein-chemistry lore goes, everyone needed some artistic flair. Indeed, Jane Richardson, under whom my thesis adviser did his postdoc, is known as much for her artistic skill – hand-drawing so many diagrams of proteins in her field-defining papers that modern visualization software still largely uses the conventions she developed – as for her considerable scientific talent.
Now, due to that same software, and other software for visualizing other sorts of data, rapid and clean images of nearly any process, relationship, or other data are merely a few lines of code away. But when the graphics are automatically created with software, rather than by-hand, something is lost. It’s all-too easy to let visualization software become a crutch by presenting colorful pictures without paying mind to the aesthetic or narrative considerations of the medium. Continue reading Doodling in the Lab
This summer, in the unlikely sleepy town of Selianitika, Greece, I had an unforgettable immersive learning experience. I applied to the Paideia Institute’s Living Greek in Greece program, devoted to immersion in Ancient Greek, at the urging of a friend. It would be perspective-changing, she said. Instead of running between classes and juggling ten different assignments at once, I would have one task–to grow comfortable with Ancient Greek–and an incredible amount of free time.
The Selianitika coastline, where I walked every day during my time in Greece!
It was a perspective-changing shift from my Princeton experience. I often feel limited by the lack of time available to fully experience the overwhelming material in my classes on campus. Beyond my Indo-European linguistics class, I want to browse through the Classics section of the library to see what I can find. In my computer science course, I want to do the optional exercises and play around with code. But independent exploration and extra-curricular learning can be hard to make time for, and I often end up working from one assignment to the next. Breadth and depth are challenging to achieve together.
