Tuesday, November 2, 2010

How to stay smart after college ... or at least feel like it.

When I got to college, for some strange reason, I felt like I was getting dumber. I had really good grades in high school, I was in the top 10% of my class, I considered myself smart. But once I met all of those new people and their smart brains I began to doubt myself. I couldn't remember trivial facts about history and grammar. And math? Forget it. I was still getting good grades at Quinnipiac, I just felt less smart for some reason.

So, I did something about it. In all reality, I can't tell you that this will really make you smarter but it definitely helped me feel like I was being more proactive about my knowledge power. I signed up for daily emails from the dictonary.com word of the day and the Official SAT question of the day.

Simple as pie, you sign up for the emails and you get brand new knowledge in your inbox every day - and let's be honest - we all check our emails multiple times a day.

Eventually I gave up on the SAT prep questions because 3/4 of the time they would be about math and frankly I didn't care. But, I always answered the grammar and language ones. I still get a dictionary word every day, and if I'm really ambitious I try to use it at some point during the day. (that rarely happens) Sometimes, I recognize the word from a vocabulary lesson in high school and it surges my brain confidence again.

All kidding aside, I think a desire to improve general knowledge after school is a really important thing. As I'm applying to jobs I realize that training will be my best friend in a new work environment, not my knowledge of the industry, or of any subject I studied. So, just as we work to improve ourselves within our job field, wouldn't it make us feel more intelligent and well rounded overall, to learn something new each day? Our self confidence and conversational abilities would definitely surge, that's for sure.

Obviously I'm not tooting my own horn here as I recognize that there's probably a few grammatical errors in this post as well as my others but it's the thought, the desire for more learning that counts right?

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