Setting goals for this semester

At the start of this semester I thought there was a high probability it was my last semester at UPenn. I asked myself a simple question: what can I do in college that I can’t do after? It felt natural to spend my time doing those things.

The first part I identified was meeting people. There are 10,000s of undergrad, grads, PhD, faculty that have gone through a rigorous vetting process. They are available to me through an email. I can meet up with them in real life. I can be in the same room as them very quickly. They span a wide variety of expertise. Not only in knowledge fields but life experiences. Yes, you can cold-email people after. You can meet them over Zoom. But it seems unlikely to recreate this broad density of knowledge after college.

The second part I identified was research. Research requires lots of people who are specialized. They must devote themselves to the cutting edge of some field of knowledge. Typically this is not profitable and so the government/university has to subsidize it. This is why research concentrates in universities. There have been $1,000,000,000s of CapEx invested over the last hundreds of years to build strong research institutions. It takes so much effort to build a system that brings in new talent that will specialize on some knowledge field.

There are also other things you cannot get after graduating: access to certain buildings, student-run clubs, sports games, the city of Philadelphia. These feel less important though and some of it is probably noise. Importantly I did not include learning in classes as something you can only do in college: a textbook, Claude, and ample motivation works wonders.

How I’ve done

In the last 3 weeks since starting this semester I have done really well in meeting new people. I have met something like 20-30 people for 1-on-1s and some more in group settings. A lot of this is going through old contacts, mutual friends, or cold outreach. I have taken notes on who they are and what kind of work they are doing. I have followed up after meeting them. I do not talk to them about myself or my ideas. I simply ask questions. I ask a sequence of questions that maximize my learning. This is usually in the domain where they are 0.1% experts. Sometimes this domain is the history of their life experiences, or the history of their emotional experiences. More often it is some knowledge field. There is a real skill in asking questions. Curiosity is also a muscle you must exercise.

I have not done as well in research. I have met with undergrads doing research here and learned about their experiences. I have gone to several seminars. I have even attempted to read and understand some papers. But I haven’t actually done research. I haven’t started any projects or tried to go deep in one direction. Doing a broad surveying of the undergraduate research landscape often substitutes actually going deep in one direction.

I feel guilty about not doing any research myself. But I don’t trust this guilt. I’ve made an active effort to do things because they are interesting and not because I “should”. The feeling of “should” is signal for a desire that is coming from the external world, instead of something that is internally directed. I have made it a goal to do things that feel internally directed. I am at my best when things come from within.

At the same time there is the practical fact of activation energy: there is something you want to do, but before doing it you have to get through something you do not want to do. This may require a push or a mental tactic. Maybe curiosity alone can’t get you there. Or maybe your curiosity isn’t strong enough, and the only way out is to lean into being self-directed even more.