As a second note, one of the challenges, then, with school, is its mechanism by which it accomplishes vetting.
Vetting is a way of establishing the student’s credibility. But it’s a far too general form of credibility.
It’s the sort of credibility that gets you a foot in the door in another school, or perhaps in an entry-level position.
But once you’re there in that new environment, you have no specific credibility with the particular people in the new institution. Suddenly, you may realize that you failed to prepare yourself adequately to build credibility with the people in this new institution. You did what you had to do in your old institution to get become credible enough to be given the opportunity to try to prove your credibility in the new institution. Enough credibility to be permitted to try your hand at a more complicated task.
But the old institution was meant not only to make you credibly ready to try the new task—it was meant to make you credibly able to do the new task.
It focuses the mind of the students, and the student’s teachers and advisors, on a form of success (getting admitted to the “next step”) that will cease to be a meaningful form of success mere months after it has been accomplished.
A better approach to schooling would be one that helps the student focus on building credibility with the people they’ll be working for in the future. That treats coursework like a means to understand the purpose of a protocol or project you’re going to be involved in. That treats labs as preparation for actually doing the procedures in a repeated, reliable fashion in your next job or course of schooling.
Instead, the whole mentality of the institution seems geared around being “done with one thing, on to the next thing.” It does not almost at all reward reliable, repeatable skill in a given task. It only rewards accomplishing things correctly a single time, and then moving on from it, perhaps forever. Sometimes, it doesn’t even reward success—it just rewards showing up. Other times, it rewards success at a task that’s unnecessarily difficult, prioritizing abilities, like arbitrary feats of memorization, that just aren’t high-priority skills.
It doesn’t even suggest that you begin building relationships with people in the real world—only with teachers at your present institution, precisely the set of people to whom the real success of your training will not matter.
Could we potentially adapt schools to integrate better with the “next steps” without fundamentally altering the approach to education? Is there some low-hanging fruit here, once we frame the problem like this? Even if not, can individual students adapt their approach to being schooled in order to improve matters?
As I see it, there are some things a student can do:
Give themselves lots of reminders about the tangible reality of the next institution or role they’ll be jumping to. Meet people, understand the job those people do, identify the basic skills and make sure you’re practicing those ahead of time, understand the social challenges they face, and their ambitions. This is about more than “networking.” It’s about integrating.
When doing an assignment or reading for a class, focus a lot of time and energy on understanding the relevance of the material to the next step. That will often mean understanding what, in a real-world context, you could safely look up, ignore, or delegate. It also means building the skills to reliably be able to look up and understand new knowledge when necessary, and being able to identify the bits and pieces that are critical to memorize and deeply internalize so as to make navigating the domain relatively easy.
Focus on getting grades that are good enough to get where you want to go. Do not pride yourself on grades. Pride yourself on real-world abilities and relationships. A’s are for admissions boards. Skills and relationships are for you.
Figure out how to witness, experience, learn and practice skills that use equipment and materials that are inaccessible to you. You can create simulations, mockups, or even just act out the motions of a technique and playact a protocol. Learn how to train yourself effectively when mentorship or materials are inadequate.
As a second note, one of the challenges, then, with school, is its mechanism by which it accomplishes vetting.
Vetting is a way of establishing the student’s credibility. But it’s a far too general form of credibility.
It’s the sort of credibility that gets you a foot in the door in another school, or perhaps in an entry-level position.
But once you’re there in that new environment, you have no specific credibility with the particular people in the new institution. Suddenly, you may realize that you failed to prepare yourself adequately to build credibility with the people in this new institution. You did what you had to do in your old institution to get become credible enough to be given the opportunity to try to prove your credibility in the new institution. Enough credibility to be permitted to try your hand at a more complicated task.
But the old institution was meant not only to make you credibly ready to try the new task—it was meant to make you credibly able to do the new task.
It focuses the mind of the students, and the student’s teachers and advisors, on a form of success (getting admitted to the “next step”) that will cease to be a meaningful form of success mere months after it has been accomplished.
A better approach to schooling would be one that helps the student focus on building credibility with the people they’ll be working for in the future. That treats coursework like a means to understand the purpose of a protocol or project you’re going to be involved in. That treats labs as preparation for actually doing the procedures in a repeated, reliable fashion in your next job or course of schooling.
Instead, the whole mentality of the institution seems geared around being “done with one thing, on to the next thing.” It does not almost at all reward reliable, repeatable skill in a given task. It only rewards accomplishing things correctly a single time, and then moving on from it, perhaps forever. Sometimes, it doesn’t even reward success—it just rewards showing up. Other times, it rewards success at a task that’s unnecessarily difficult, prioritizing abilities, like arbitrary feats of memorization, that just aren’t high-priority skills.
It doesn’t even suggest that you begin building relationships with people in the real world—only with teachers at your present institution, precisely the set of people to whom the real success of your training will not matter.
Could we potentially adapt schools to integrate better with the “next steps” without fundamentally altering the approach to education? Is there some low-hanging fruit here, once we frame the problem like this? Even if not, can individual students adapt their approach to being schooled in order to improve matters?
As I see it, there are some things a student can do:
Give themselves lots of reminders about the tangible reality of the next institution or role they’ll be jumping to. Meet people, understand the job those people do, identify the basic skills and make sure you’re practicing those ahead of time, understand the social challenges they face, and their ambitions. This is about more than “networking.” It’s about integrating.
When doing an assignment or reading for a class, focus a lot of time and energy on understanding the relevance of the material to the next step. That will often mean understanding what, in a real-world context, you could safely look up, ignore, or delegate. It also means building the skills to reliably be able to look up and understand new knowledge when necessary, and being able to identify the bits and pieces that are critical to memorize and deeply internalize so as to make navigating the domain relatively easy.
Focus on getting grades that are good enough to get where you want to go. Do not pride yourself on grades. Pride yourself on real-world abilities and relationships. A’s are for admissions boards. Skills and relationships are for you.
Figure out how to witness, experience, learn and practice skills that use equipment and materials that are inaccessible to you. You can create simulations, mockups, or even just act out the motions of a technique and playact a protocol. Learn how to train yourself effectively when mentorship or materials are inadequate.