A few days ago, I had some great conversations with a few friends, particularly Ms. S. She’s always full of valuable insights when it comes to learning strategies, ways of thinking, and career advice. Below, I wanted to share some of the key takeaways from our chats.
- Graduate students need to learn how to master methodologies.
- One should try to maximize the benefits of a task to avoid wasting time.
- Knowledge from different areas must be effectively exchanged and debated in order to develop one’s own insights.
- Never stop dreaming and never stop thinking about the possibilities for your future.
- Mentioning one’s experience with setbacks during an interview is meant to understand the candidate’s methods and steps for dealing with adversity.
- In the age of technology, it is important to know what tools you are capable of using and which ones you excel at.
- Don’t focus on the outcome of things; instead, understand the essence of the matter and the “long-tail effects” it can create in the future.
- Multilingual individuals continuously output, create, and seek out environments that foster their language skills.
- Use the shadowing method to practice pronunciation and intonation.
- The reason we feel pain and are impacted is that reality differs from our expectations; this difference arises from unequal perceptions and misunderstandings between each other.
- Learn how to persuade others! Present data, evidence, references, and logical explanations. Most importantly, ensure that others understand and are convinced by your arguments.
- Through extensive reading practice, even those who have not learned speed reading can effectively improve their reading speed, as the volume of material is the key factor that facilitates the “chemical reaction.”
- Review the table of contents, preface, and concluding sections at least ten times until you are “very familiar” with them. At this point, your mind will be better prepared for the information you are about to encounter, and your ability to absorb it will be several times stronger than if you were to dive in without thoroughly understanding the material first.
- The process of “grabbing key words” allows you to understand the content of the book in the shortest amount of time.
- The Persistence of the people: the importance of education and hard work.
In the novel Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, the author shows the strict social class system in America using examples from his own life. He highlights how rural white workers often distrust the elite and admits that without help from key people, he might have ended up in a similar tough situation as many in his community. Nevertheless, he uses his own success to argue that the “American Dream” is still achievable through education and hard work. - The new ideas proposed by others often serve as just a “general direction.” In reality, they don’t know how to execute them or to what extent they should be implemented. This requires time to align with the their preferences; there is a lot of room for creativity, but it can also lead to feeling a bit lost.
- Establishing our own system.
The exploration of different subjects provide diverse perspectives on this field.
