At University there are many ways of learning new content, but in this post, I’m going to be talking about learning things in a more self-directed way, more relevant to courses like honours or research-based classes, where things aren’t necessarily explained explicitly.
Largely, there are two ways of learning things: you can ask a tutor or supervisor, or you can try to figure it out for yourself. I am currently doing a research project in collaboration with several staff members in the final year of my degree. In this project, we are doing a systematic review and I have been tasked with writing up the protocol, something I’ve never been taught how to do. Initially, I was very nervous as I was completely lost on how to start and realised I had two options, either ask my supervisors how to do everything when I would hit a barrier or learn how to write a protocol from first principles and figure it out all on my own; I chose the latter.
The reason I chose to learn from first principles is that I was to go into research after I finish this degree, so I decided it was crucial I understand how to do research. This makes a lot of sense but at the time this task can seem extremely burdensome. I picked up the Cochrane Handbook of systematic reviews, a 750-page text explaining how to do a systematic review and was initially very overwhelmed with the complexity and magnitude of what I had to learn. Rather than sit down and read this before bed (when I normally read) I decided I would essentially switch out my kindle for my phone when I’d normally just scroll aimlessly through social media and read the handbook. Whilst this doesn’t seem too fun, it was extremely effective as I’ve now written my protocol from scratch and have completed a significant chunk of the handbook, and crucially, I understand how to conduct a systematic review. I could have asked the supervisor to hold my hand throughout the process but I wouldn’t have gained anywhere near as much knowledge out of it, which is fundamentally the goal of the project.
Despite reading the handbook, I continued to hit barriers where I would feel the need to ask for help, a recent example being the statistics surrounding meta-analysis. Statistics have never been a strong point of mine so reading example protocol and seeing a whole bunch of letters such as I, Q, Tau and more I was again, very overwhelmed. I resisted the urge to raise a white flag and ask for help and researched what these statistics mean, why they are important and how to use them so I’d be able to write how we would use them in our review. It took me two days to unravel the secrets of these statistics but I eventually got there and asked a PhD student if I had understood them correctly, and thankfully I did.
Learning these tasks from first principles was very useful for me, not just because I got a deeper understanding for the processes which I was learning, but because they reinforced that I could learn anything I put my mind to, even if I was clueless beforehand. This extra confidence is really reassuring and empowering because I now feel like nothing can stop me and I’ll always be able to figure out something if I need to.
Ultimately, no matter what you are studying you will encounter scenarios where you are at a loss on how to do something. I’m by no means recommending you don’t ask questions, because throughout the process of learning all of this I sought feedback and asked plenty of questions but when it comes to significant processes, don’t ask for the answer or solution to be spoon-fed to you because you gain nothing from that. If you try to learn from first principles, you will gain a much deeper knowledge of the task at hand, and this will always result in higher marks. So next time you hit a barrier and don’t know what to do, look it up, and try to figure it out for yourself, I guarantee you’ll be able to and you’ll gain much more in the process.
Harrison Hansford 