Monday, September 7, 2009

Pick the Professor

This New York Times article reminds me of the best advice I got in college. Pick the professor, not the subject. You will learn nothing taking a course with a bad professor. There are dozens of courses I have taken where I didn't learn much of anything. A complete waste of time. Often they were in subjects I was actually interested in learning too. Many other times I have taken courses that sounded silly, post colonialism comes to mind. However they were taught by great professors. So despite little real interest in the subject matter, I both had a far more interesting time taking the course, and learned a lot more...

In graduate school I solved this problem by going to a whole bunch of courses for the first week. Then dropping the half of them that seemed worthless. As an undergrad you must try harder though to ask older students who the good teachers are.

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