Mike Oren.com

On Monday, I had my 25th birthday and now find myself a quarter of a century into life or roughly 1/3 of an estimated life expectancy of 75 for males (see Wikipedia's life expectancy list). It was generally an uneventful day, I woke up early and finished some reading for class, went in to do some research (I did make an effort to go out for lunch), went to class, etc. Generally life has gone well for me, not too many complaints, I've been fairly lucky with different opportunities that have arisen, some strong and helpful friendships, etc.

I don't have much time to be spending writing this post, but I've been reflecting lately on what I see as the main differentiations between what I perceive as strong students vs. weaker ones and these are the basic skills that I feel are crucial for the success of students, particularly as they move on to graduate school:

1. Self-motivation - being able to identify what they want to get out of an experience and making an effort to increase the opportunities to get what they want
2. Reading - not reading word-for-word, there's often too little time to allow that in grad school, but the ability to quickly scan and parse pages for key ideas, passages, etc. This is an extremely difficult skill to acquire and master since it's more natural to read each word and we're often taught to ead and re-read for deep understanding (and you should still do that--for text of particular interest to you/your research interests), but first you have to parse the text to identify these areas.
3. Rational thinking - thinking in a purely logical, rational has long been the way to conduct scientific research and while some people are able to adopt this cold logical thought process fairly easily, I've found that many find it an unnatural way of thinking since people don't really think in a completely linear fashion--we take shortcuts and make logical leaps to conclusions.
4. Critical reasoning - rational thinking is useful when looking at the steps in a process, but it's also important to be able to pull in diverse pieces of information and get a view of the large picture and this is where critical reasoning comes in. This is a particularly useful skill when tied together with reading as it is extremely difficult to parse important passages without properly developed critical thinking/reasoning skills that can be used to analyze all of the information.
5. Writing - I wrote a little bit previously about my frustration with the writing skills of students because without this skill one cannot effectively communicate anything from the previous skills. Oral communication is also important, but generally written communication is the primary way of disseminating information and way for instructors to evaluate a student's understanding of a concept. When I speak of writing, I don't mean grammar and spelling (they are both important still), but rather I mean the ability to clearly articulate a message in a well organized manner.
6. Have fun - I had intended only 5 items, but then I realized that perhaps the most important thing of all is to make assignments your own. This can't be done in just solving math problems so much, but in any written assignment, there's almost always room to add your own personal touches to it that reflect your interests and allow you to have some fun with the assignment.

Maybe one of these days I'll get around to a real post, until then I hope somebody out there finds this useful.