The experience of transitioning from working 50+ hours per week to having 12 lecture hours + study hours per week is interesting. The first thing came to my mind was how to spend the vast amount of extra hours. There is a saying goes like days are long but years are short. So should I use the time for studying, doing sports, reading, self-exploring, doing charities and ministries, spending time with families, or starting a business? All of those are meaningful things, and it is hard to prioritize given I am still in my 20’s and this is my first long career break after undergraduate in 5 years. I understand this could be once in a life time opportunity as my responsibilities will increase and probably won’t have the same level of energy and health as in the 20’s. Keeping the work mentality and lifestyle seem to be the most efficient way of accomplishing all of the above goals, which means breaking my time into work sprints and vacation weeks. After all I believe having trained at work for 5 years has definitely taught me many many meritable things.
- Time is very limited at work. Sometimes all we need is just the answer and solution to get pass the objective, and there will be many similar hills to climb. Now as a student, this is in fact a very efficient way of learning — looking for specific answers. There is also a term called SQ3R in academia — search, question, read, recite, review, which has the same idea.
- Facts and tools are not as important for work as understanding how to do it again. Knowing algorithms is crucial to pass coding interviews, but it won’t help you for doing the daily tasks. Implementations are like the facts, they can be looked up or googled. What’s important is the concept. At university, many lectures and homework are easily misunderstood as fact finding. I found it very helpful for me to jot down the concepts rather than the facts. And this could potentially save a lot of time, which is a very valuable thing when a person ages.
- Work is all about application. Some of which I just cannot find in the university classes. If the curriculum is very board, it made me wonder whether everything I learnt will be applicable in the next job. Every piece of information I chose to learn at work was related to my performance one way or the other. Lacking to find it in the learning material made me wonder if my brain energy should be spent elsewhere.
- At work, there were usually many meetings during the day, in a very thought-provoking manner. Applying this mentality and environment to studying is valuable. At work I always write down the meeting summary right after. Then pass on to the meeting organizer, management, or teammates. This helped me to recollect what has been discussed and what will be the future actions in a very detailed way. This technique can be applied to lecture notes. Taking just few minutes after each lecture to review the notes, summarize it, clarify it, and question it could make a difference.
- There is productive time of the day and unproductive one. Being a student can eliminate the unproductive period as I am not getting paid to sit in the same office chair doing the work needs to be done.
- There was also something I learnt from being a student which can apply to work. Work is mainly recognition based. The number of JIRA’s, emails, scripts, readings we go through everyday is immense. It was very hard to remember what I have accomplished 2 weeks before. So constantly reviewing and reciting things could possibly take the work to next level. The ‘RAM’ in your brain needs to be exercised, and sleep acts like database archiving which stores some of those information permanently for you. Think of working as a way to accumulate knowledge rather than just earning the bucks. Getting enough sleep was usually not a problem being an employee due to the responsibility to not arriving late and perform regularly at work. However with much more flexibility and freedom, students can easily miss out good sleep hours.
