learning outside the classroom

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, and always up to something in social good x tech.

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onto today’s topic: learning outside the classroom 🍎 

i can say with confidence that in any field, you’ll learn a lot more through tangible experiences rather than in a classroom. regardless of your major being comparative literature or computer science, you learn by making mistakes, and school isn’t set up for us to do that.

school is a system of always getting it right. it’s interesting, because you’ll never intuitively know what’s right, unless you’ve experience what’s wrong and developed that reasoning for yourself internally. knowing isn’t enough — experience develops confidence and skill. 🪡 

you can’t rely on getting perfect professors completely aligned with your specific learning style. unfortunately, the reality of school is a lot of self-teaching, and that’s often what gaining experience entails anyways. so, you might as well rack up the tangible experience instead of solely flipping through textbooks.

let me rapid fire some examples to put this into perspective:

journalism major? pick a topic you’re interested in covering, go set up a few interviews, write an article and publish it somewhere (either the school paper, on medium, or go the extra mile and cold-email a couple of smaller news publications). ✍️ 

computer science major? code a project and actually ship it to potential users. if it’s daunting to commit to something like that, compete in something short-term like a hackathon.

neuroscience major? start emailing labs on campus to assist with their research or write a draft of your own literature review.

despite the constant talk of securing summer gigs, internships aren’t the only way to gain experience — it’s rewarding to seek experience for the sake of our own growth rather than to just polish a resume. 🗞️ 

i’m certain that we all enjoy learning, just not necessarily the type fed to us at school.

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