School Exams Give You Too Few Reps

If all your practice comes from school exams, you will never get that many chances to practice.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

Add society and it changes. If you have a startup, if you do something over and over again, failure or success over and over again, you learn that some things are super hard, and if you do not try a certain number of times, you will never get it.

This is why we try so many times. Why we submit so many applications. Why we meet with so many people. Why we ask so many people for suggestions.

The trouble with exams is that the feedback is low frequency and high certainty. A few tests a semester, the teacher sets the questions, you answer, right earns points, wrong loses them, and you know exactly what you missed. Real life runs the other way, high frequency and low certainty. Build a product and the market will not tell you which question you got wrong. Send a resume and the company will not tell you how many points you were short. Apply to a school and the admissions officer will not say paragraph three of your essay cost you five points.

Mistakes in school are also expensive. Fail one final and your GPA drops, so school trains us to be afraid of mistakes and to prepare fully before acting.

That logic breaks outside school. A conversation goes badly, what did you lose? Talk to someone else. An internship turns out to be a bad fit, what did you lose? Try another direction. Trial and error out there is cheap, so you should do a lot of it.

That leads to the second thing I want to tell anyone applying to study abroad. Think about the industry before you apply.

A lot of students plan to get into a good school first and figure out what to do later. Get the ticket, then pick the room. But the application itself asks you to show a direction, and admissions officers want someone who knows what they want. The way to find a direction is not to sit and think. Think for three months and you still will not have enough information, because information only comes from doing.

Talk to people who have worked a few years in the industry you are curious about. Ask what their days look like and what they hate about the job. Start a project, even if it fails. Apply for the internship, even if you get rejected. Every attempt is one more sample.

A transcript proves you can take exams. The hundred things you tried prove you can keep moving where there is no answer key.