xPhone

Everyone remembers the Matrix movie where the phone is one’s connection into the grid and you can hyper-transport to anywhere you want to go. It seems great till you realize that the phone is why the grid has its tentacles into you all the time. The iPhone is the umbilical cord that has insidiously eaten away your freedom. Brothers and Sisters, Big and Small, are always watching. How horrible is that?

It gets worse. The cell phone will drive us all to distraction. Of course, driving distracted with a phone is a leading vehicular problem, but more than that, the phone disrupts your life tremendously, and not just when driving. The cell phone is the leading cause of interruption in one’s daily routine. Why do we allow it to be so? If a person interrupted you ever so often while you were reading, talking or just trying to get things done, you would consider it rude. Yet we are infinitely forgiving of this inanimate object, showering it with gratitude for making a mess of our day!

The segment of the population most impacted are teens to young adults, who have been raised by a cell phone. They spend more time interacting with it than with humans, books, or nature. Being raised on a steady diet of information driblets, much of it vacuous talk, is the most unhealthy foundation on which to grow one’s mind.

It is a parasite that is destroying young minds. It sucks away useful time and destroys concentration. My casual empiricism suggests that even if there are two five minute calls each hour, each of which lead to a further loss of five minutes each in terms of interruption of some other tasks, we lose one-third of our waking hours to this scourge. For students, in terms of study time and quality of life, this is a humungous cost. In terms of mental development, the long term costs are catastrophic.

A recent study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology showed that excessive cell phone usage results in a 25% drop in a student’s grades. So a student with a 4.0 GPA falls off to a 3.0 GPA. Its become that easy to depreciate an A-student to a B-level one.

The study also showed that interruptions from a cell phone not only impacted the receiver’s performance, but it also distracted others and impacted them negatively too. Its become as bad as second-hand smoking! Maybe even worse, because while the number of smokers is declining, the number of young cell-phone addicts is climbing exponentially.

The parallels with smoking hardly end there. Have you noticed how funny it is that the orbital region of 20 feet from the entrance to a building is mostly populated by smokers or cell phone users? Sometimes the poor victim has succumbed to both scourges. Have you noticed that the way people walk when smoking or cell-phoning seems strangely similar? Self-absorption with a glazed-over look. Blissfully and self-importantly unaware of impending doom. The only problem is that we have not yet invented a “patch” for cell phone quitters.

Cell phones are of course lawful. There is no legal age before one can get a cell phone. I’d like to propose disallowing it for anyone below the age of 25. It would save an entire generation from academic deterioration and lay the groundwork for a better society. My advice to all you college undergrads is this: make the cell phone the xPhone.

How to Study: Prequel

My last two posts dealt with student adversity, what it feels like, and how to deal with it. I also talked about good study habits, which are essential to deal with academic difficulties. It is important to remember that good habits are yours and not someone else’s. You have to find what works for you. Studying itself is not that hard once you find the rhythm and routine that works for you. In short, there is a lot of effort up front to find your method, and there is no short cut for that.

Today I will write about how to get into a frame of mind to be able to develop good study habits. These are the habits I wrote about in the previous blog post. The habits are concepts, their exact form depends on your rhythm, and that is what takes searching and working hard to imbed those habits into your routine. But before you start doing this, let me mention something I have seen in many students in trouble. If you are a student that has been struggling academically you are probably feeling low and demoralized. Everyone is telling you that you are no good, and should give up. You are saying this to yourself too, probably. The first thing you must do is break out of this cycle of self-defeating thinking. Here are four simple guidelines.

1. Stop being negative. Easier said than done. But necessary. The good news is that you are now in the worst place already, and things can only get better, since you have decided to begin trying. The fact that you came to talk to your advisor about it means you are already on the mend. Things are starting to look up. Isn’t that a simple thing to tell yourself? Do so, its true.

2. Stop procrastination, and begin working. The biggest reason people procrastinate is because of fear of failure. All I can say to you is that its a stupid thing to be afraid of. The probability of succeeding if you don’t try something is zero! The probability of succeeding if you try is definitely greater than zero. The probability of failure is irrelevant, isn’t it? What I am saying is, focus on the probability of success and ignore the probability of failure. You will feel better immediately.

3. Reputation and ego don’t count. The real cost of failure lies in feeling bad about yourself. You may worry that others will think worse of you too. My advice is to stop caring about what anyone else thinks. You should even stop caring about what you think about yourself. Thinking about what you think about yourself is already getting you down, so why keep going there? Just do what needs to be done, and do it as well as you can. Enjoy doing it, not what you or anyone will think after you have done it. Most of the time, when you have done something after deciding to just enjoy doing it, the results are really good, and you begin to feel better anyway. You will feel better even if you don’t get results. The act of doing something itself works its own wonders. Just working on it helps intrinsically. Don’t think, just do.

4. Start somewhere. At some point you will need to get a good rhythm going to get results. But thats not the first step. The most important thing before you develop a routine is to break your current inertia. Just make a list of a few important things you know you have to do, but have been avoiding, maybe because your ego cannot deal with it. Forget everything else. Now, take any one thing and begin on it. The harder the better. Don’t think of anything else and give it all your attention for an hour or two. Get in the zone. You will find that what you thought was hard turned out to be not so. And then everything else will feel so much easier. You are suddenly on your way.

Well, I hope this helps. Once you are rolling, see if my previous post helps. Its a eleven-point plan for good study habits. But for now, keep things simple with a priming four-pronged attack to get you on your way: (1) Negate negativity, (2) Procrastinate no more, (3) Ignore ego, (4) Go after Just One Thing.

How to Study

Many students end up doing badly because they have not been able to find a rhythm for their academics. This can be disconcerting and lead to plenty of frustration. However, it is not that difficult to work out an approach that works reasonably well. This is not to say that one size fits all and that there is a single solution that works for everyone. But there are some general principles that seem to work well in helping a student find his/her working style/rhythm. So here are some pointers.

1. Study First. Deal with the academics before everything else. Let play come later. This is a very important guideline, especially for a struggling student. Of course you need a balance between work and relaxation, and working all the time is not going to be good for you. But not putting the study time first will in fact prevent you from reaching a sweet spot in terms of balance. If you get your work done first, you will in fact enjoy the remaining time much more, as you would have earned the much needed time off to relax and rejuvenate. Ask yourself in all honesty, do you think you will enjoy your life more by doing this the other way around? I doubt it. And believe me, I have tried it too. It did not work. So let me say this one more time, make this the mantra — Study Comes First.
2. Write. Writing helps push what you learn into long term memory. It also helps you understand better. This is especially true for technical material in math or science. But it works well even for literature and languages. When you sit down to read and study, keep a pad and pencil at hand. Scribble down things as you go along, or try to create a summary of what you are reading. I call these “marginal notes”. I keep them and I find that when I want to review the material after a few days, it comes in real handy. These are actually nothing but crude mind maps. Writing small marginal notes and filling all the ideas from a chapter of reading on just one page really helps put the material into visual memory as well as distills down a full conceptual understanding that is easy to retain. If you are working through a chapter, it is also a good idea to underline or highlight important sentences, but just as useful is to write “margin notes” (different from marginal ones!). Then when you re-read the chapter, those notes ping your brain and resurrect rapidly all the salient points you had stored away. It has been said that thinking flows from the tip of a pen. This is very true, your brain focuses so much better when you hold a pen in hand and scribble along points to remember as you read. So remember, keep Writing.
3. Walk and Talk (to yourself). There is documented research showing that memory is enhanced when walking. I have often found that after an hour or two of study, reading and making notes, it helps me immensely to close everything down and take a walk, with the sole purpose of recalling back everything I have just read. It is like playing the movie of my study time back in my head as much as possible. When I was a student, I would always quickly look back over my marginal notes, and then take a walk, talking it all back in my head. I have found a marked difference between my understanding of the material when I did this versus when I did not. The contrast is quite remarkable. It is a way of revising the material by walking the talk. There is something about walking that helps a lot. Maybe the act of walking keeps other distractions at bay. So, take a Walk to Remember!
4. Be Neat. The hallmark of good learning is a tidy mind. How do you keep your mind tidy and everything you are learning straight in your head? Its simple – keep the learning environment tidy as well. Make sure your notebooks/binders are organized in a tidy manner. This takes only a minute or two a day, but it certainly helps. You can plan to do this every night before closing shop for the day. Also use the same time to make the plan or list of things for the next day. Putting your agenda on a list is another way of being tidy. But most important, make every effort to write in a tidy manner. It is amazing what a difference it makes to retention. Reading tidy, well organized notes makes learning vastly better than working from chicken scratch. So make every effort to do this. Nowadays, with computers, we write less and less. No matter. If you are working on a computer, try hard to have an organized system of working for each course. Decide on a system for folders and directories. Decide on a file naming convention so you can find things easily. So try hard to be neat in every way, and it will translate physical neatness into mental neatness, and bring great academic results.
5. Stay Current. Be up to date in your understanding. Be on the ball every day. This means finishing classes for the day and taking the time to review all the material that day itself. You can do this along with the time you spend tidying up things. If you find there are things that you did not understand from class, dig deep into your text book till you resolve your confusion. Or ask someone for help. But do not let it go. It always comes back to bite you. The things you neglect to study have a probability of appearing in the exam that is five times that of the things you do study! I hate to remember how many times I have fallen prey to this fateful probability. And then there you are, sitting in the exam, kicking yourself for skipping over the topic when you had all the time in the world to learn it well. Now it is too late. So do it all the same day. Its not hard, and once you get into the routine, you will find it easy to do on an ongoing basis. The best part is when you get to exam week, you have nothing to do, but be fully rested for the next day. I remember getting into this rhythm about somewhere in middle school. Once I had gotten into the habit, it was terrific. I would even find myself reading ahead, which made the next classes so much easier to follow in class. I recall never even studying during exam week. When everyone else was burning the midnight oil, I would be lazing and relaxing, being outdoors and truly nailing the exams the next day. So be on top of things, its a good feeling, and gets great results.
6. Read around. Do not ever restrict your reading to just the material prescribed for class or the assigned text. Take the time to read around the topic as well. This helps in two ways. First, you see the material from different angles and this solidifies your understanding. It creates a gestalt that is deeper than one that is based on only a few points of contact. Second, you will understand the linkages between what you are learning and other important related concepts. This brings a holistic understanding that improves retention. Context is a very important part of understanding and memory. So read more, read outside the box.
7. Practice. Just like sports, practice helps. Repeating things trains the mind just as sports practice trains the body. This is why homework is very important. It really makes you good at what you are learning. It has been said that no one even begins to be an expert in anything until they have spent ten thousand hours of practice at it. So make the time, it is well spent.
8. Block out time. Students who find it difficult to concentrate and focus need to first solve this problem even before they can get down to the business of study. So it is important to ask what is causing the lack of focus? In my experience, it is almost always some other distraction, coming from an inability to realize that studying is a priority. What can one do? The solution is to block out a fixed time each day, at least two consecutive hours, where you commit to going to the library or sitting at your desk and not doing anything else but try to study. You can plan this time slot the night before, when making your list for the next day. Trust me, this works very well. It is a device that effectively keeps the distractions away. Oscar Wilde would do this and he was one of the most prolific writes of our times. He would sometimes sit for four hours and write only a few words, but it would be the most wonderful writing. If you sit down for two hours, inspiration, learning and understanding will come. Of course, just two hours of study is not enough, and you will need to put in more time some other time of the day, but having a predetermined allocation is the strong base that helps focus. You should preferably put this time slot as early as possible in the day so that you can get started and put Work First. Even if you have no work at all, still, use the time to review or practice. The time to yourself, immersed in working the mind is very good to help you achieve a calmer and more serene educational experience.
9. Challenge Yourself. Take each course seriously. Go for an A in each class. Of course, this does not mean you will get an A. But if you aim lower you will end up much lower. So much of education and life is setting expectations for yourself. And you will surprise yourself. Why not take the chance and enjoy the surprise? You are in college to get an education. Why not give yourself the best one you can get?
10. Promise Honesty. Never cheat. Do not even think about it. Yes, there are times when you feel like getting help from a friend on a homework you are explicitly supposed to be doing alone. Resist that temptation. Ill-gotten results are dishonest and the one you are making a fool of is yourself. Promising yourself to never cheat will also leave you no choice but to work hard and be your own person. Its a gift you can give yourself.
11. Teach others. Being a good student also means helping others learn. And of course, there is no better way to master a subject than to teach it. Even if you are not going to be teaching others all the time, try and do it some times. And when you are studying, ask yourself whether you have learned the material well enough to be able to teach it to others? If not, give it another read. I think this is the single best way to become a better student. Asking yourself each and every time if you know what you studied well enough to teach others will automatically ensure that you follow all the other guidelines described above.

Well, these are just a few simple ideas that served me very well in all the years I was a student, from high school, to undergraduate and in graduate school. To recall, these are: Write, Walk and Talk, Be Neat, Stay Current, Read Around, Practice, Block out Time, Challenge Yourself, Promise Honesty, and Teach Others. Its a simple eleven-point plan. You know you can.

Student Adversity

This is my first post this year, and it comes at a time when things look very gloomy in the world. The recession appears deep, and students are struggling with finding jobs or even paying for their education. I still think investing in human capital remains the best investment.

However, the real investment in human capital is not monetary (paying fees) but instead, it is sweat equity. Students often imagine that their mere existence on campus after paying their fees goes directly to their human capital bottom line. Wrong. Human capital accretion comes from investing time and energy into really learning. And more, from learning how to learn.

An undergraduate education is intense. It takes students time to settle down, by which time they may even have missed many important concepts, all of which needed to be deeply understood, so that the student can move on to the next level. But students wing it, thinking they will pick it all up later, or worse, convince themselves that it is not really important anyway. That puts a students on a slippery slope to real ignorance, and leads to deep erosion in human capital. Sooner or later you get found out, the evidence starkly staring back from the grade sheet, or if you are unlucky, you get caught in the workplace, when there is even less chance of taking remedial action. So my advice to all undergrads is: pay attention, do not slack off, and the harder something is, make an even bigger effort to master the material. It will pay off handsomely.

Here is an interesting way to think about why you need to pay attention every day and work hard to make sure you get the concepts now. Doing so will lay a solid foundation for the subsequent classes. Many courses are sequential in learning, especially the math and science ones. An excellent analogy to college classes is a video game. These games are extremely structured and sequential. And they are utterly unforgiving. You can never proceed to the next level until you have mastered the prior one. My advice to students is to treat your classes in the same way. Do not assume you can proceed to the next course in the sequence without mastering the ones that come before. Even though you clearly can move on without mastery, it still pays to treat it like a video game. That way you will get much more out of your education. Young adults, especially boys, know how willing they are to put in hour after hour into mastering a video game, especially one in which they compete against multiple players. So why not put the same effort into classes? Your course work is the same, its a multi-player game in which some win and some lose.

As I write this, I am trying to put myself in the shoes of a struggling student, one who has seen his grades drop off, cannot get organized, finds it hard to concentrate and focus in class, feels like nothing is going right, is suffering from low self esteem, and feels like he/she may never recover. Almost every term, there is a student in my office who is in academic difficulty, and is going through a great deal of emotional stress. It has been so for the past fifteen years I have been a university professor. What advice do I give? I always listen and then try to find a constructive solution to the problem, but until now, I had never thought about putting it all together into a constructive set of suggestions. I do not know if this is feasible, but I intend to try. So here goes.

1. All is not lost. Thats the first thing to realize. No matter how difficult the situation is, universities are remarkably good environments in which you get lots of chances. And even when you think there are no more chances, a creative professor/mentor will always be able to find some way to help you out. Remember, college drop-outs are those who gave up themselves, not those on whom the system gave up. So the first step is to realize that there is always a way to betterment, provided you realize two things: (a) Take responsibility, (b) Work very hard. Lets talk about each in turn.
2. Take responsibility. Remember, by the time you are in college, you are an adult. You are independent. No one can better help you than yourself. Every so often I have a student in my office who insists on blaming his/her predicament on the system, the adviser, the teacher, parents, etc. This is a huge mistake. Sure, we are often put in difficult situations by ending up in situations that we had no choice over, and it is easy to blame the circumstances. But no matter how justified your external problem, its better to realize that it pales in significance to your internal responsibility. Everyone ends up in situations beyond their control. How you handle these situations is what matters more. And the first step is to take full responsibility for your own success, learning and condition. It is very easy to blame your professor if he gives you a C in class, but instead you should thank him. He is nothing but the video game, saying “game over”, but he is also saying “try again, I know you can do it, do better next time”. In fact, you should be saying to your self, “try harder”. I promise you, just Keep Trying and things will suddenly start to get much better.
3. Work very hard. College is a wonderful time, if you work hard. I know of nothing else that pays such huge rewards for hard work. In real life, there is often a lot of luck involved. Not so in college – work hard and success is pretty much guaranteed. If you do not work, you will also do poorly. Again, it is so video game-like. Get a little distracted and you never get to the next level, nor do you score well on the current one.
4. Less is more. Okay you are saying, I take responsibility and I wok hard, it seems so simple, but I have already been trying to do both these things and it just does not seem to be working, and I am frustrated and troubled, what am I to do? I am amazed at how many students just seem to be unable to dig themselves out of a hole, and there is a simple reason for this. They have poor habits. If you get up late most days, spend a lot of time watching TV, find it takes a long time to settle down to work, cannot find things when you need them, spend way to much time talking with friends, etc., then you need some urgent streamlining. Just remember one thing: “Less is More”. Make a list of things you do on an average day. Then simply knock off half the items and commit to not doing them for a month. You will feel less overwhelmed by all the things you try to do (they are now halved after all). You will feel more in control. You will actually start getting things done.
5. Sequence better. Every night before going to bed, take out a piece of paper and make a list of things you need to get done the next day. It has been shown that doing this calms the mind, and enables better sleep. This means you get up refreshed the next day with a clear mind, and perform better in class. More important, you are committing to completing tasks the next day, and can plan your time accordingly. The next day, keep the list with you as you go to class, study group, mess, gym, etc. After each activity take out your list and cross of a completed item, and also scan it to see what you have left to do that day. Steadily and calmly work through your list.
6. Manage distractions. Today’s undergrad has huge distractions. There are friends always coaxing you to join them in leisure activity. TV beckons. The internet is a constant craving. Your cell phone keeps ringing, and you keep responding to text messages in class. How can you ever get anything done? There is no easy way to deal with distractions, but to exorcise them ruthlessly. Stay away from technology as much as you can. When you use the computer keep the browser closed. Do not look at email. These are “filler” activities, to be done when there is nothing better to accomplish, or when an “earned” break is availed of. An earned break is one that is only taken after completion of an important task. Note also that it becomes easier to manage distractions when operating under the “less is more” assumption. If you are trying to do too much, then nothing gets done properly. But more important, less gets done, because less bandwidth is applied to each task, and all tasks ends up taking longer. Yes, it is hard to give up many of those fun things in life. But remember, that fun stuff is a distraction and it is not even real. It loses its appeal quickly, unlike real accomplishment. Real results from hard work are the most self-reinforcing things we can ask for.
7. Be honest. To yourself. This means taking a long hard look in the mirror and being truthful about who you think you are. Do you want to do better? Just when you are feeling tired and lazy and do not want to work, even though it is critical you do so, you might hear a small voice in your head saying – “Heck! No worries, its all fine. Nothing will go wrong, the exam will be easy, you already know more than you need”. When this happens, stop it immediately. Don’t lie to yourself. Be honest to others as well, especially teachers and parents. It never pays to hide something no matter how ugly you think things will get when you come clean. By not being honest you pay several costs. First, you feel uncomfortable because you are lying, either to others or to yourself. Second, you are lying to yourself, and whats the point in cheating on your self?
8. Communicate with your elders. When things are not going well, students have a tendency to withdraw and not talk to the very people who can help them. Sometimes they do not want the advice they know they will get. These are the wiser ones. They know what to do to solve their problems, but are in denial, and don’t want to hear of it. So they withdraw from speaking to elders. Bad mistake. Find at least one if not more than one elder person to talk to every day, and if possible many times a day. This could be a professor, parent or senior student. It will definitely take the sting out of the emotional distress you feel as a struggling student. Once you feel calmer, you will be able to work better.
9. Report on your day’s activities. One of the biggest problems I have noticed is that students in academic difficulties have low self-esteem. And it does take some time to dig oneself out of the mire. In the interim it is important to begin to feel better about your situation. One very useful device is to commit to making a daily report to an elder. It also helps communicate with your elder but just telling someone else that you planned a list of items for the day and got many of them done will immediately bring a feeling of accomplishment, even if in very small doses. To validate your accomplishments, it is important to speak to someone older, else you do not get a sense of validation. A daily verbal report also motivates you to make sure that you have something to report, and incentivizes you to work hard to have something by the end of the day.
10. Give yourself plenty of time. One of the reasons students get into difficulty is that they do things at the last moment. This never works, trust me. And it only makes things worse, because last minute preparation for exams infuses great panic. In such a state you can never perform well. The same applies to daily work as well. If you get into the habit of waking up early you will find yourself automatically getting a lot more done. Why? Because there are far fewer distractions in the early morning. Most others are asleep and you can get started and almost finished by the time anything else gets started. By giving yourself time, you can work calmly and steadily to reaching your planned goals for the day. If on the other hand, you plan to get your class preparation done by going to the library after dinner, there is a good chance nothing will get done properly. You are tired after a long day, will get sleepy and most problematic, if the task takes longer than you expected, you have left no slack to make sure you will get things done. Thats a huge risk. Many students and adults too, just do not get this at all. They are perpetually ill-prepared. I don’t advocate getting up at 4am or something, but I also don’t advise getting up past 10am. The main idea here is to get up early enough to get some decent work done before the big distractions of the day kick in. Also, by getting a few things done early in the day, you set yourself up for a better subsequent part of the day too. You feel happy and calm to have got some work under your belt already and this reflects in the work you get done subsequently. Nothing breeds on success like success! So give yourself time to get things done. Again, remember that less is more. Do less and give yourself more time to do it by getting started early in the day, and eliminate distractions. Do this, and you will be a powerhouse of accomplishment.
11. Be self-aware. This is really nothing else but being honest with yourself. Do not convince yourself that you are a real genius by talking like one. Sooner or later people come to know you are full of it. But being self-aware also means recognizing your weaknesses and working harder to overcome them. Some students fail to perform adequately because they don’t study enough. Somewhere along the line they erroneously convince themselves that they have mastered the material or worse, that it does not to be mastered. There is only one antidote, work harder (Harder subsumes smarter as well). Recognizing you are below average is the first step in working your way to becoming above average.

So, if school is proving to be hard, and you are struggling with classes, try to commit to the practices I described above. I assure you I myself used these ideas with my students and it seems to help them. I use them myself too. In short, if you want to turn things around, do less, do it differently, do without distractions, and work very hard. Just do it!

It is often said – “Nothing changes until you do”.

Need PhD?

I get many emails from young intellectuals all over the world about getting a PhD. The gist of the missive usually runs as follows: “I am really interested in doing a PhD. It has been my dream for the longest time imaginable. Attached is my CV. Please take a look at it and give me advice on this.”

This sort of naked request comes with little guidance, rendering any attempt to provide advice specific to the case a stab in the dark. Trying to do so is like a doctor prescribing apposite medicine for a specific ailment when the patient has only indicated that he/she is feeling unwell. But some broad thoughts are always helpful, and here they are.

Are you sure of what you want? Asking for advice on doing a PhD assumes you have concluded that this is what you want to do for a reasonable period of time in your life. Are you being led into this by some fanciful imaginations of gilded academic life? Is there nothing else you could do with your life than this? If the answer is a strong yes, go for it. Any doubts, I would hold off. Academia is too weird an environment and probably does not suit most people. And there is no prior experience that correlates to it. Most of us in it took a chance, and for those of us that remain, it was something that worked out!

Remember, getting a PhD is a long hard struggle for 4-5 years (maybe more) and then becoming an academic is not usually monetarily rewarding. It is said that doing a PhD is a way of giving up current income so as to give up future income! Getting tenure is hard and needs some luck at the best of times. So you have to love the work even though it is easier to love the lifestyle. So be quite sure it is what you want most of all. You will not be able to say – “So what if I am not happy. At least I am rich.” No, financial glory is not part of the package.

In broad terms, think through whether you want to use your PhD in an academic institution or you want to be in industry. If you want to be an academic then ask yourself if you like teaching? You can hate teaching and still lead a successful academic life, but this is becoming less and less acceptable.

Are you good at working independently in a self-motivated manner? Barring conference deadlines and infrequent promotion reviews, there is little pressure on academics to perform on the research front. Engaging co-authors in this process is a partial solution to this problem of motivation, but not over a long period. You have to be sure that for the next few decades, you will feel like getting up every morning yearning to do research. This is of course not always true, there are so many mornings that one gets up cynical, but if this feeling persists, its time to get out. You don’t have to if you are tenured, but seriously, there is no point in lingering. Its like being retired and doing nothing. In that mode, research retirement is the waiting room for career demise.

There is a lot you need to be sure about, but there is one thing you do not need — you don’t need a thesis topic the day you enter graduate school. Even students that come in with a well-thought out topic often end up leaving that area of work and learning something new. Reinventing oneself, I believe it is called.

So keep an open mind as a newly minted graduate student. The purpose of all the course work in your field is to sample from the glorious buffet of intellectual ideas and then to load up on a few items. You may find that the mind food you enjoy most after a year is quite different from the initial research you came looking for.

I highly recommend trying to publish something, no matter how small, before deciding on a PhD. Innovative research and creative exposition are all very well, and intrinsically enjoyable, but there is also the painful process of getting yourself published. You have to deal with referees and editors, whose initial inclination is to reject all and everything. The effort of reworking a paper based on referee comments, and responding to all the criticism usually amounts to more than all the creative work that you initially put in. If you cannot take the heat of the review process, then this profession is not for you. It is also hard to get this experience when you are not in the process. So why not go ahead and give this a road test by trying to write something publishable? You may even find that the process of writing is not as rosy as it was when you only imagined it. Go on, kick the tires, give it a spin.

Are you good at managing your time? It looks like academics have a lot of flexibility and degrees of freedom with their time, and yes, that’s true. But it’s really needed. A professor that is fully engaged has several papers in process, classes to teach (some old, some new), administrative work on campus, meetings to attend, papers to referee, editorial work, conferences to attend, and more. While this seems like a short list, it is important to realize that each of these tasks individually takes a lot of time, and needs blocks of quiet concentrated effort. Many times, it is hard to call up the focus and concentration needed to get this work done well. So there are “dead” periods when nothing is happening and it all gets really frustrating. Maybe it’s good to do something else in that time. But good time or bad, you need to be very good at handling time well.

It’s important to realize that being an academic is truly entrepreneurial. There is no boss or subordinates. You are truly on your own, or with a few co-authors. In the classroom also, you are the sole leader of the pack that does not have to agree with you or like you. And almost all service on campus is of little consequence if done poorly, but can have a huge impact when done well in an entrepreneurial manner. Are you a leader or follower? You may well be a solid academic as a follower but you will never be the one that has the Seminal Idea.

I think its important to be warned about the lifestyle. Its alluring but deceptive. Hang around and do nothing but intellectual chit-chat in cafes is what the outsider always seems to see. But getting paid poorly to do work that is unsatisfying (unless you like being an academic), even if you can never be fired, gets old pretty soon. After the fifth day of ignoring the calling to research and lying on the beach basking in the glow of tenure, it all begins to start feeling rather empty. I tried it, and so I know. I could not even take a month off without feeling that the “what me worry” lifestyle had failed me. I had to do something creative to keep me from losing my mind. So, don’t be fooled by the lifestyle. If you really just want to make a lot of money and then lie on the beach, do just that, and stay away from academia.

So the only advice there is can be summed up as: If you “know” that you enjoy research and will love teaching, don’t mind working all the time, anytime, for small money but great personal satisfaction, then sign up now. But don’t do it because you think the lifestyle is great, or you believe some rosy picture of an academic in an ivory tower.

What’s the Use?

I am often faced with the following question from students: “Why do I need to learn this, if it’s not related to what I need for my career or not important for my life?”

I never understood where this question comes from nor did I grasp the question sufficiently well to be able to offer an adequate or convincing response. Mostly my responses were specific to the question asked, such as, “This topic is really important because so many dollars and this many people are impacted by what happens with these ideas that we just learnt today”. But recently, the penny dropped and I think I have found a more general reply to this question. Its summed up in two words – “everything’s connected”. With this perspective, it becomes clear that everything is relevant.

And indeed it is. Taking too narrow a view of education can be very costly.

1. Should not men learn about motherhood? Will it not make them better fathers?
2. Should not social scientists be aware of the main results in the hard sciences? And the other way around?
3. Should not the rich understand the poor? Can they really? If they did take a few steps towards this, the world might be a much better place. More than other things, being rich is not assured forever (though it may seem so to us lesser endowed folks). Learning what it is like to be poor might just come in handy when the good going stops.
4. Should not the physically able learn about the handicapped? And they do. There are often occasions when we temporarily injure a limb or small appendage, and quickly realize how great the inconvenience is. Even though we never expect to experience a permanent handicap, sometimes it serves us well to experience the disability temporarily in order to empathize with the less able.
5. Should not a poet learn some mathematics? Is there not poetry in mathematics? I know of no mathematician who would disagree. There is certainly mathematics in poetry, the notion of meter, rhythm and rhyme is intensely mathematical. Everything’s connected.

So, even when you never expect to experience something, for example, childbirth for men, that alone is not a sufficient reason to say that one does not need to learn about it. This I think, is abundantly clear, even in this analogy.

The chain of wisdom follows quite naturally.

• Realizing that everything is connected means that nothing is irrelevant.
• Knowing that nothing is irrelevant lends purpose to learning.
• Motivated learning leads to deep understanding.
• Profound understanding begets the wisdom of the ages.

Being curious in a purposeless manner leads to great wisdom.

What’s In It For Me?

I have now spent over fifteen years in academia, primarily in business schools, and have watched social scientists at close quarters. I have also spent time in hard science environments. I may be completely wrong but social scientists (economists in particular) seem to value their time more than hard scientists, whether or not their time is or is not more valuable.

Putting effort into something brings both material and hedonic benefits. Material benefits comprise money, reputation, external respect. Hedonic gratification comes from personal challenge, resulting in growing self-respect. We tend to value the former more than the latter. Valuing material benefits seems more concrete and easy to do than understanding the value of hedonic benefits. The greater the precision with which we can evaluate an outcome, the more we seem to value it.

I have found that social scientists constantly weigh the costs and benefits of activities to assess how much they contribute to their own enrichment. They are very reluctant to give their time to something unless the question “What’s in it for me?” is favorably answered. Hard scientists on the other hand, I find, slip extremely easily into a discussion or help students and peers without even coming close to the WhatsInItForMe (WIIFM) debate. I suspect there is much more hedonic value in hard science discovery, resulting in a lesser need for material gratification. The flip side is that social scientists value their time more because the material side of their gratification is of large proportion and easier to identify. This bottom-line mentality suppresses curiousity, further reducing hedonic enjoyment.

Social scientists invented incentive schemes but still fail to understand them. Game theorists come up with complex mechanisms that “optimize” and improve the welfare of all, even when each and every one in the game is asking WIIFM. But, you see, the game is “Nashed” (achieves a Nash equilibrium) wherein the starting axiom is that people ask WIIFM. But what if this axiom were not true? What if agents did not really always care about maximizing the value of their time? What if, God forbid, people are “irrational” and WIIFM is not a guiding principle of decision-making. Is it just possible that we might achieve even better outcomes by including hedonic outcomes in the WIIFM equation? I think hard scientists have managed to solve the latter quite well without being bogged down in the dogma of tightly defined incentive schemes.

The ability to give of one’s time when no material or reputation (ego) benefits are available is liberating. It simply allows you to access more ways to feel good than only when WIIFM is greater than zero. It just broadens the range of things that in it for you. It brings hedonic benefits. And if we dont value those hedonic benefits very much, then its time to really get worried about who we really are and what priorities drive us. I would not worry, there are many folks every where in the world that are not stuck in the WIIFM rut. We need to remember that when we have the time and we do not give it, we lose hedonic benefits; or we substitute them for material ones, of which we already have plenty, so that the marginal benefit of these is low enough to be poor trade-ins for the hedonic ones. Even an economist would know how to maximize benefit at the margin. Its too bad that being “too good” an economist actually prevents one from being just a good one.

Repeated experimental evidence has shown that economists (in comparison to other scientists) tend to offer the least to an opponent in the ultimatum game, thereby guaranteeing themselves lower outcomes when opponents reject their offers (Just google this is if this game is unfamiliar to you). By working out the exact correct solution to the game in which WIIFM is the guiding axiom, they do worse than were they to include hedonic benefits in their thinking. So it is that being “rational” leads nowhere. Just expanding the WIIFM question to whats in it for others results in empirically better outcomes.

Those who define rationality too narrowly in social games are forever doomed to lose them.

Academic Teams

Academic history is replete with examples of great team work, leading to seminal breakthroughs. But some research partnerships (pairs) are very long-lasting. Its always made me curious as to what underlies these successful marathon work relationships. One such research pair comprised my Ph.D. committee and another resides in my department. So I have been priviliged to witness first-hand the workings of such teams. Here are some of the characteristics that appear to be common to these collaborations.

1. These partnerships are forged early in the career life-cycle. I am hard-pressed to think of pairs that came together well after both people had made their marks and completed seminal work. Of course, this raises the interesting question as to whether the individuals would have been more successful on their own rather than as a team. Who knows? The fact that they did eventually also make their individual marks does not resolve whether the initial burst of seminal work would have come were it not for teamwork.
   
2. The initial relationships are unlikely to have been based on the common research interest. Every team I know has some stronger non-research based reason for its existence. Its often times common alma maters, advisors, extra-curricular interests, nationality, vices, etc. But not similar personalities! Every team is something of an odd couple. Were it only research interests, most likely it would not have worked. Were it similar personalities, it would most certainly have been dead in the water.
   
3. Teams spend a lot of time in “bonding” activity, even when the relationship matures over time. Its easily postulated that with time, common interests develop, leading to the team spending more time outside of research, but with a feedback loop into the work relationship becoming better and better over time.
   
4. The skills of the team members appear to be complementary and are really poor substitutes for each other. Of course, this is how it should be. I have noticed work collaborations where people’s skills were similar, devolving into subtle disagreements about minor and highly similar points of view. In short, much ado about nothing. In complementary skills settings, each member remains the master of their domain, eliminating debilitating intra-team turf battles.
   
5. The stylistic differences of team partners is often quite obvious. For example,
   
   
   
   • Writing: pedantic versus light, humorous.
     
   • Orientation: Theoretical vs empirical.
     
   • Attention: Big picture vs detail-driven.
     
   • Audience: Academic oriented vs practitioner oriented.
     
   • Personality: Extroverted vs introverted. One a showman, the other lying low.
     
   • Training: oftentimes both team members come from very different original disciplines.
     
   
   
6. Strong teams overcome adversity and difficult periods. They stand together and solve unforeseen problems, and never indulge in the blaming of each other. Its a fair collective.
   
7. Good teams are always characterized by fairness in sharing work and balanced in taking credit. Such teams almost work too hard to be egalitarian within the team. But its this aspect of these teams that makes the team what it is. In some cases, this works so well that readers of their research area often believe that the team is but one person.
   
8. Good teams tend to have ideas generated by both members. Sometimes a paper is predominantly the idea of one, and sometimes its the other. The outsider may easily identify the work of each player in the team, but not which of the two had the original idea for the work. For instance, when one team mamber is a theorist and the other an empiricist, its easy to knwo who did what, but not necessarily easy to know where the idea came from. Hence, good teams are rarely the outcome of adisor/advisee relationships. They may start out that way, but their long-term existence is dependent on the source of intellectual ideas becoming blurred to the outside reader.
   
9. Good teams do not always work together with no break. Of course, there are exceptions. But teams do tend to go through periods of detachment, followed by renewed teamwork. Many times, the resuscitation of the team comes with their work taking on an entirelynew direction, which is also the hallmark of a good team. Its not usually stuck in the same rut.
   
10. Good teams retain individual style and identity. No matter how blurred together the joint work becomes, each member continues to work on other projects with others as well. This is the interesting thing about academia. Most of these team characteristics, might also apply to a good marriage. Except this last one, for whereas academic promiscuity might be enhancing to team worth, one would hardly claim this to be true of marriages.
    

Will we see more such partnerships as collaborations become easier with the enabling connectivityof the web? Or will the ability to work with anyone in fact make it less likely to work often with just one? Hard to say. There is something exciting about being in a team and fighting for limited journal space. And certainly, it is not the intellectual partnership but the sociology of it that is most intereresting.

Method Supreme

Today was the penultimate class in my new course titled “Quantitative Business Models” (QBM) which comprises a collection of topics about the use of quant models used in various business settings. We studies topics ranging from optimizing portfolios to estimating systems using neural networks. The entire course is an eclectic collection of topics that do not fit inside any other course, nor do they form a meaningful thread in this course itself, apart from the common feature that all topics required somewhat advanced quantitative work.

The course was a list of topics I really wanted to learn about, and in my own selfish way, I realized that teaching was an easy way to pre-commit to my learning. I made this clear at the outset of the course, and warned folks that they were taking a big risk here. Since no one listens to me anyway, about twenty-five students remained, and I am immensely grateful. It has been one of my best teaching experiences ever. And certainly one of the best learning ones too. I hope it was as good for my students.

I think I have learned from experience that the courses I like the most are the ones where the teacher learns as much if not more than the students. When its a 2-way street, its not more an effort. This course was really hard in terms of the new things that needed to be learned before teaching, and I am sure it was hard on the students too, since they needed to come up to speed in gaining a pretty big new skill set, mainly from using a lot of mathematics, and translating that into working code using a widely used open-source econometrics/matrix language. But with feedback going both ways, it felt like no work, and all satisfaction. Last week I was away at a conference, and I missed the class.

On a more important note, this class did something else for me. At a time when education is being dumbed down, and in particular, as business education gets really soft, this course was like the last bastion of an age in which rigorous thought trumped fluffy verbiage. As buzzwords fill up the heads of business students, the chance to teach cleaner technique and eschew jargon felt like a breath of fresh air. In contrast to teaching how to sell snake oil, it was a relief to teach pure mechanics, and show that one can optimize a business decision in the old-fashioned way, that is, by thinking hard about a problem, and then applying apposite technique. Like in all business decisions, there comes a time when one needs to make a judgment call, but taking the analysis as far as it can go is an important pre-requisite that we must not lose sight of. Teaching QBM renewed my faith in the idea that there is hope left for the idea that business in schools may become a hard science, especially when it certainly seems to be heading that way in the real world.

I usually teach derivatives, and since these are zero-sum contracts, one always ends up feeling that a good derivatives trade is a scam perpetrated by the quantitatively adept on the mathematically inept. Or, one ends up teaching where arbitrages might be detected and how to profit from them. Maybe all of finance as a discipline seems tainted with this issue. So for a change, it was nice to teach QBM, where the purity of the techniques was given most play, rather than the “free lunch” aspect. It was more about the journey (technique) than the destination (making profit). Good method is its own reward.

Of course, this is just my view. Researchers fall into two broad types, those that enjoy the story and the others that enjoy the method. I fall into the latter group. A good story is what sells papers, but a good method still needs some story to go with it. Happily, this is not the case with the teaching side of QBM – the method tells its own story through the applications we looked at, but these stories never detracted from the pure enjoyment of the creativity embedded in these models. How I envy the people who first thought them up! If it is so much fun teaching this, how much more fun it must have been to discover these creative ideas. I am sure that in this class of more than twenty students, there is some chance that one of them will develop a whale of a good idea, what in the Valley we term a “killer app”.

Teaching method has another valuable feature – it trains the mind to think rigorously. It does not teach you what to say, but what to do. Actions speak louder than words, and the models are all about action. Action that is generalizable to other domains, because a thought process knows no boundaries. Its hands-on learning, and brings the satisfaction of learning by doing. In my case, learning by teaching. Today evening, as the class presented their projects, I kept on learning. For this gift, I am immensely grateful to all in class.

Learning for the Sake of It

One spends so much time learning for the sake of it, only to die, not taking learning with us. So what’s the point? Why do we learn things that do not add to our material needs? Why are we not totally bottom-line oriented like animals? (I am out on a limb here – I am not sure if my definition of learning does not encompass all sentient beings).

I guess there are two types of learning: (a) Learning for a purpose, and (b) learning out of curiosity. One might easily re-classify that as learning for conscious reasons versus learning for uncontrollable ones. The former usually plays out in colleges and schools, the latter in the theater of life. I am going to argue that the only real learning is that which comes from curiosity. Formal learning in the classroom is only useful if it kindles curiosity.

You are going to object vociferously and say that learning to add numbers is certainly real learning. You may not do it out of curiosity, but still, you did learn something that can be used to carry out several other tasks. But did you stoke your curiosity when learning this to ask deeper questions about the task of addition, such as – “What is number?” – “How can I do this faster?” and so on. If you did not, you did not really understand what you learnt, and hence, it was not real learning.

Now you will say to me, can you please define “real learning”? Sure, here it is. Definition: Real learning is that which helps you learn more. You learn more when you get curious about various phenomena. So if you took that math class, hated it, and did not ever want to do math any more, did you really learn anything? Do you think you will remember and use the math you managed to pass your exams with? I doubt it. Real learning is empty in itself, its just the trigger to seek more. False learning, seemingly full of content and purpose, is sound and fury signifying nothing, for it leads nowhere.

Real learning is innately visceral. Imagine the toddler sticking his fingers into a power socket, and receiving a (non-fatal) shock. Did he learn from his curiosity? Sure? Did he “know” that he learnt something? I would argue yes. Has it ever deterred toddlers from exercising their curiosity? Hardly. Mistakes are just the feedback mechanism in true learning. Taking responsibility for one’s mistakes is meta-learning!

Surprise is an incredibly powerful learning mechanism. I find that sometimes students vocalize the surprise when that eureka moment occurs in class. Such moments only happen when the student approaches learning with curiosity. Curiosity sets you up for an expected result, and then delivers another. Its the contrast that burns the idea deep into your brain. And it works in reverse too. Not knowing what to expect makes you curious, and motivates learning. Learning comes from an exploration of the unexpected.

Learning by curiosity can only be done in your own personal style. Formal learning is done in the teacher’s way, and can only suit you up to a point. Therefore, the only thing a good teacher needs to do is to kindle curiosity in the subject, provide some perspective, and then let the student loose to explore at will.

There are two polarized classroom styles, Lecture or Socratic. The latter, where the teacher gets the student to learn by asking questions formalizes curiosity. the lecture method works too, but places the burden of curiosity on the student. Which one is preferred depends deeply on one’s view of where the responsibility for learning lies, with the teacher or the student? Why not mix them up, and get the best of both worlds?

Our educational system is becoming more and more an arena of formal learning, and not one that fosters curiosity. Students are taking their curiosity to the internet, and leaving it behind in their dorm rooms before coming to class. We are multiplying the number of degrees and certifications, but not training people to think and question. Students are punching the clock of boredom in an insane rush to get a piece of paper that entitles them to search for a better job or salary. We are measuring learning with the grading system, and not with our imagination. Who is better off – the student who diligently jumped through all the hoops and got an A, or the student who got so involved with some aspect of the class, that he spent hours tinkering with the ideas, but did not then finish his homework, only to get a B? I think the evidence of real learning is whether the student can do independent research based on what he/she learnt, because you can never do that unless you are curious. Thats why I like to assign end term class presentations, and they always turn out great, especially in substance and not in form.

Most of all, if a student worries too much about the bottom-line of the class, to his career and job, or the grade, then its just meaningless learning for a purpose, and is not real learning. No student should come to class until its out of curiosity, just for the sake of it. So I say to you, come to class only if you have no real reason to do so!