The 10 things I wished someone had told me entering college (part 2)

#6) Make friends. Singaporeans have an extremely bad tendency of clumping together... really if you wanted to hang out with other Singaporeans, why fly 10,000 miles away from home. I stuck with 3 of my American room-mates for all 4 years, and I am grateful for the very close friendships that I have with many of my American friends (many of whom I am still in touch with). .. but there's no better way to give you an insight to the US as well as lend a different perspective to the issues we are grappling with in Sg

#7) Write a dissertation and get yourself  involved in research. The crux of a university is the creation of knowledge, not the regurgitation of knowledge... so I don't think you really get a quintessential part of university without yourself engaging in the creation of knowledge by writing a dissertation itself.

Writing a dissertation helps you not just to crystallize your knowledge, but in helping you develop your toolset to solve the problem that you have chosen. You will also learn how to choose the right problem which is not a trivial task.

To write a dissertation it is important that you get involved in research. For those in the hard sciences and engineering, it's important that you join a lab group early on (even in your first year, if not your first summer). If there aren't paid RA positions, offer to work for free. For the social sciences, it is important to identify faculty that you can/ want to work with. Start with the things that you are really passionate about and take the initiative to approach them.  

#8) Find and develop mentors and learn as much as you can from them. 
You will be surprised by how few people actually make the effort to attend office hours. As much as possible, it is important to find mentors that you can learn from. They can be your seniors, graduate students or professors... and make it a point to learn as much you can from them... you don't know how much you might need their knowledge and assistance in the future.

I got into graduate school because of David Bradford, a public economics expert who came up with the X-tax ( a flat corporate and personal tax). I worked with him on global climate change and never learnt anything from him about public finance and the X-tax. It was only when I got to MTI that I regretted not having learnt anything from him having asked to look at suggestions to reform corporate taxation by my bosses because he had passed on by then. I cried while working through the stuff, all the while wishing that he was still around.

#9) Take more classes than you need....  Don't limit yourself by the classes that you have to take or are required to take. I frequently sat in for up to 7-8 classes per semester as an undergraduate (where the usual load is 4-5)... In most cases I would be enrolled (since Princeton didn't have a cap on maximum number of classes) ... and I did so even though it didn't help me graduate earlier or with more degrees. you never know what you might learn or pick up.

#10) The best things in life are for free.  I wrote about working for free... but is not just that. It's about working for the things in our life that we are truly and deeply passionate about. This is one of few times in life where you have the space and time to give yourself to your dreams. Write down your dreams, tell people about them, write about them...

The 10 things I wished someone had told me entering college (part 1)

It's the start of the academic school year... and instead of rehashing some of the advice I have tried to give incoming students... I thought it would be useful to write all of this up. I try to identify the most useful things, things I wish someone told me when I was 18.... things I have only found out were extremely useful say

#1) Get ample opportunity to work on your writing.

Most colleges prescribe a writing requirement. But I cannot reiterate the importance of learning (relearning) how to write. In many occupations, most especially if you end up working in the government... you will be judged predominantly by your writing. Writing is a hard skill to "teach" as well as to "learn" and the best way to learn how to write is to write and get feedback. I did the most writing in my first semester in college... my political theory class required 1,500 word essay every two weeks, and my history of medieval europe required 500 words every two weeks. So I was writing every week. I had a painful experience learning how to write from my political theory tutor. She liked the ideas I had, but I was just wasn't doing justice to those ideas and it got so bad that she gave me a C+/B- on my second essay (very bad in American terms). She wouldn't take the "I used to be a science student, I can't write excuse" and literally coached me through the remaining weeks. My vindication came when I got an A+ on my final exam paper.

#2) Be on top of numbers. Make sure that you include a Statistics/Econometrics/Accounting class. Whatever your job is, you invariably have to look at numbers, learn to be discriminating with them, and also use them to your advantage. The use of statistics teaches you to learn how to communicate and think with numbers.

#3) Learn how to program. okay I don't care what major you are, but in this digital day and age, I regard programming skills as quintessential... after all you use the computer every day, don't you? When you get to work, it's not that you will end up programming... but very often, if you have to deal with data, it is useful to know how the computer programmers have set up the database, and how it can be improved. Warning here... programming classes are and can be painful.... expect 20 hours of work every week, or as I tell people 2 hours of programming and 18 hours of debugging... but treat it as "character building" ... you won't regret it.

#4) Don't pass up a chance to learn a new language. I took up both French and Japanese in college.... (my claim to fame was to do a sequential translation from French to English for Abbe Pierre to 600-700 people). Learning another language is a way to communicate and connect to people of different cultures, and to learn and appreciate from their different experiences. It also helps us appreciate our own heritage and culture more.

#5) Work on your communication skills. The underlying thread behind #1-#4 is all about communication.... #1 is about communicating through writing, #2 is about communicating through numbers ... and when you learn #3 you realise that learning programming is almost like learning another language. To this mix, I would learning how to speak, make powerpoint presentations, not make powerpoint presentations... One of the best things here in the US elementary school education is that kids do show and tell starting from kindergarten. It's a skill that you never stop learning.