Learning to Learn
We all know that kid who coasted through school never needing to study or put in real effort to retain information from classes. The kid who breezed through exams, killed it on the ACT or SAT, then went to college and flamed out. Well, I was that kid. From elementary all the way through High School I never really developed a study habit and it has repeatedly hampered my attempts to learn new skills as an adult.
I am very “passion project-y”, as a friend of mine once put it. I find new interests and I hit them extremely hard for a few weeks and then I tend to leave them behind once I find a new interest. In the past couple of years I have spent time diving into IT skills, guitar, mandolin, cooking, hiking, writing blog posts, Object-Oriented programming, building dungeons and dragons campaigns, lifting weights, nutrition, basic machinery, inventory systems, financial aid counseling, various forms of activism, learning various languages, bettering my financial and mental health, developing video games, self producing music, and perhaps most oddly, potentially owning a capybara.
I say all of that to say this: I have to re-learn how to learn. At the beginning of 2020, I shifted my focus towards becoming a data scientist. I have always held the belief that many of the problems I see in the world can be addressed by the proper collection and application of data driven solutions. I had already begun shifting my mindset towards wanting to be more directly impactful in the world around me, and I believe that data science plays a role in every facet of our lives. Of course, this meant I hit the data science path aggressively and just as passionately as I had every other path I’ve gone down in my life.
After a solid month of researching my options, I applied to and was accepted into Flatiron’s online data science program. I started the program by giving it all of my attention for about a month. I got way ahead in the program, and decided to take a small break to focus on other things. If you remember two paragraphs ago, you can probably guess where this is going. My two week break turned into two months of inconsistent effort that got me far behind. In our second module, I had barely begun to progress in the content when our final project was assigned.
As you can imagine, catching up was exhausting, but I did it. I charged through the content and was able to turn in my project just ahead of the hard deadline. Binging the material, however, left me with a very loose understanding of the data science, and data science is not a subject that you can get very far in with only a loose understanding.
This led to what I like to call a “come to jesus” meeting with my instructor. He told me, very plainly, that I could continue in the course or I could move back into the next cohort, but unless I committed to changing my behaviors I would always create extra stress for myself, both in and outside of the course. Now, I had heard this message before. My parents and a few teachers had said the same thing, and despite it being proven over and over again it never really sank in. This time it did.
My instructor helped me work out a weekly schedule that made sure to commit enough time to the course. It has helped me to slowly catch up in the course instead of burning myself out completing 3 sections a day and then losing momentum. We checked in with each other almost daily at some points to make sure that I was being accountable for my time. It was going very well, and then my instructor passed.
I wouldn’t say that we were close, but he was an extremely valuable and important resource for me. I had never really had someone that was as purely supportive, vulnerable, and honest with me. Having someone keeping me in check really helped me build some good learning habits. Now I have to keep those going and learn to learn without someone guiding me along all of the time or checking with me daily. I have to commit to finishing one thing before picking up another.
Honestly, there’s not anything better to start this commitment with than data science. Data science is going to open up so many doors that will allow my small passions to become tools for me to make a real impact, and I could not be any more committed to that.