Lessons Learned as an Undergraduate

These lessons are from James D. Watson:

1. College is for learning how to think.
2. Knowing “why” (an idea) is more important than learning “what” (a fact).
3. New ideas usually need new facts.
4. Think like your teachers.
5. Pursue courses where you get top grades. After you’ve satisfied requirements, choose courses that naturally interest you, not ones someone else thinks you should care about. Then give these courses your all.
6. Seek out bright as opposed to popular friends.
7. Have teachers who like you intellectually.
8. Narrow down your intellectual (career) objectives while still in college.

Source: Avoid Boring People (Lessons from a Life in Science) (2007) by James D. Watson.

Great advice especially #1 and #2. It seems in todays universities campus life is more about propaganda and shutting down “questionable” speech that might offend students than about critical thinking skills and listening to opposing view points. If you can’t listen to another viewpoint you never will learn. Yes, the truth can shock and sometimes turn your world around but eventually you will be okay. The key here is how to think and not what to think. I am not talking about facts—that’s okay. What I am talking about here is the professors opinions, biases and prejudices. Professors are authority figures. Even role models. They are responsible for what they teach their students. So, if professors are teaching students their biases and prejudices—that’s the very definition of brain washing.  Students are not learning what they need to learn. 

The “why” in lesson two reminds of learning how to document programming code in college. The instructor said when you document a subroutine you put why you wrote it instead of what it does. The code itself takes care of the what. Maybe that’s what congress should do when it makes a law—explain why they wrote the law. Then again that might too much of their time and they don’t consider that important.