Self-help guide for students

I was correcting a paper from my student today and it triggered in me a chain of thoughts that I would like to share here. I will try to analyze a typical student-fail situation with you. Hopefully, it will serve us as a lesson to learn what not to do. 

Source: http://www.majormosermusic.com

I don't think it would be appropriate to use my student's real name, so I will use a fictitious name from a book I am reading. I will call him " Yossarian " (from Catch-22).  

So Yossarian is the classic very smart-very reserved guy, a talented person that is constantly achieving much less than what he deserves. The first time I met him it was during the student's presentation day. It was an opportunity for students that spent a year doing research in biomedical engineering to stand up and show off their work. Yossarian spent one year doing research for a surgeon. Very few people get this opportunity to directly work with a surgeon and be able to perform research that can have direct impact in the clinic. 

Most academic researchers have to spend years demonstrating that their ideas are worth exploring, before catching the interest of people that are linked to the clinic. Yossarian was offered a short-cut and needless to say, he managed to underachieve and have ZERO work done in a year. In Italy we have a say for this kind of situation: "Some people have teeth but not bread, while others have plenty of bread but lack teeth to eat it". 

Italian bread, you definitely need teeth to eat it - Source https://www.lacucinaitaliana.it

On the surface it looked like he was just a lazy student, but I had the feeling that he genuinely tried, that he had the qualities but lacked proper guidance. 

Obviously nobody wanted Yossarian as a student for the following year, so I decided to give him a chance. I have to confess, from my side it wasn't just kindness, I also wanted to test myself and see if I was capable of leading others and making them successful. 

With Yossarian, I tried to test the pygmalion effect, which states that "the belief in another's person ability brings that ability to life". So we spent a year working together, as I suspected he had talent and he was smart, but somehow he could not stop from shooting himself in the foot all the time. His tendency to complicate his life made my job very difficult. 

Most people think that to be successful you need talent, Yossarian is the living proof that talent is not enough, the missing ingredient was "the right attitude". 

This post is quite long already so to be more concise I will try to make a list of some of the most common mistakes I noticed from students:

• Spoonfeeding: it's normal to find bumps on the road, Yossarian was expecting me to tell him what to do all the time, even when he already knew what to do. Especially when you supervise several students it's very energy-draining to take care of everything. Your boss or your supervisor will definitely appreciate if you come up with solutions, not just problems and expecting the solution to be spoonfed back to you all the time.
• Low self-confidence: people say fake it until you make it, don't listen to them, that's crap. However, you should stop doubting yourself too much. Telling yourself that you are not capable of doing something it's a form of procrastination. It's a cowardly way to avoid dealing with problems. Yes, it's uncomfortable as hell to step out of your comfort zone, but that's how you grow. Your self-doubt can be your worst enemy, you should always ask yourself: "what's the worst that can happen?". We live with so many fears, most of them never materialize.
• Lack of focus: we all have problems, yet when you are at work you should leave your personal tragedies out of the door. In Yossarian's case his problems were taunting him everywhere, student debt, shitty apartment, exams, arguments with his girlfriend and the existential dilemma of whether pineapple should be used on pizza. They distracted him so much that he could not focus on anything. Thoughts are going to inevitably flow in your mind but you have to learn to compartmentalize your thoughts, ignore what's distracting and chose to focus only on what's useful for you at the moment.  Please NEVER suppress your thoughts, that's how you get something pinned in your mind and won't leave you alone. It's called ironic process theory. For example, if I forbid yourself from thinking about dancing bears, you are not going to stop thinking about it. Ignoring a thought it's better.
• Continuity: you can be more productive in a couple of hours of intense work rather than 8 hours of occasional commitment. Yossarian was basically working day and night, yet he could not get anything done. I noticed that he would often work one hour then go somewhere and then come back and do another hour. That's a recipe for failure.
• Don't sweat the small stuff: if you want to be successful you need to learn to make difficult things look easy. Yossarian was a genius in making small problems look insurmountable. He was just making his life (and mine) more difficult.  
• Low expectations: Don't set the bar too low for yourself. Sometime I am amazed by the lack of ambition of students. If you don't believe in yourself who else will?
• Procrastination: Do you know why we procrastinate? Because we think about our future self as a different person. We always presume our future self will be healthier, have more time and more energy than ourselves. This is why we tend to postpone doing things. That's how Yossarian was constantly struggling to keep up with his daily tasks.
• Questions: I appreciate curiosity and I encourage all my students to ask me questions. However, we need to be selective on what we ask because each time we answer a question we consume will-power and it can be exhausting spending an entire day with someone that asks you all sort of meaningless stuff. I also include emails in here. Try to limit the amount of emails you send, think ahead of what you want to ask and if you want an answer ask a question, so many times I receive vague emails where it's not clear what the student meant to ask. When in doubt I don't answer.  
• Planning: Start your day knowing already what to do. Yossarian was coming to our lab clueless about what he would do during the day, by the time he was figuring out what to do, it was often time to go home. Perfect example of how you get nothing done.
• Habits: our brains love habits, if you do something always at the same time and in the same way it will get easier to perform this action over time. You want to make your life easier.
• Be curious: try not to hate what you do. You should always try to find a way to enjoy and be curious about things. This way time will fly and you will require less energy to get work done.
• What could I have done better?: You should always ask yourself this question. Strive to improve yourself, always. What is death if not immobility?Be dynamic.

Oh man, this is hell of a list already and I could add more stuff. The good news is that after a year I was able to get Yossarian to write his first manuscript that hopefully will be published in a scientific journal. That's much better than the NOTHING he achieved the year earlier. But, it's not over yet. Right now we are going through edits and revisions. Slowly Yossarian is changing his attitude and he started generating outcomes from the work he is doing. Unfortunately, his masochistic side is still alive and well. He still struggles to perform the simplest tasks and correcting his article is a nightmare. Ironically, like the Yossarian in Catch-22, right now he has a few people that feel the impulse to kill him. 

Are you still thinking about the dancing bears?

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