This weeks readings focused on mainly one thing, college and what it's all about. I found many things to be very useful from the readings, starting with that college just isn't for getting a job, it's for much more than that. In the article "What is College For?" by Gary Gutting, he stated "...college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically." Surveyed students also said that they thought college had helped them to mature as a person. The article was saying that college isn't just for getting a degree and a job, but it has much more value to it that you wouldn't think about, such as just getting a better understanding and knowledge of topics you don't know a lot or anything about. That article made me think a lot. My main reason of going to college was to get educated and a degree so I could get a good job in the future. (My knowledge was that getting a degree in college was the only was I was going to become a teacher in the future, because I couldn't without a degree.) But now that I'm thinking about it, college is much more than that and I'm going to learn more about the value of college in the future.
The other article I liked was "How to Become a Deep Thinker at College". This article by Cal Newport a computer scientist said in order to become a deep thinker, you need to follow these three steps.
"Choose a mixture of courses that all seem interesting to you. No more than half of these courses should be in a subject that you already know something about. (This will keep things novel.)
2. Calculate the number of hours per week you will need to handle the workload for these courses.
3. Double this total. Keep this number of hours free in your schedule. This probably means you won’t have many activities going on. This also means the course load you choose in (1) must be reasonable."
Those steps show you that if you want to become a deep thinker, you're going to need a lot of time. The students who have more than enough time to think, work, and understand their work will become great thinkers.
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The tips I will put into practice right away are from "The Hunt for A good Teacher" saying to pick professors you like, and pick classes you may not be interested in, or not know much about. I think those are important because if you take a class you don't know much about you may find that you're interested in it. Even if you're not, you still got some knowledge out of that topic, which later in life, you may find yourself stumbling upon, and then you will know something about the topic you never knew! The tip I will put into practice from Cal's article is to not rush from one thing to another and be finishing my work at the last minute, because if I do that, then I won't become a deeper thinker or even learn anything from my work. One last tip I will want to use is to always make a plan and work the plan. Everyone can do things that seem impossible to them, but they need to work hard. And an easy way to do that is make a plan and go through with the plan!
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