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Syed Khalid Jamal
Going to college is one of the most memorable times of one’s life. Students enter the system and make their way in many different directions. They enrol in a programme, make friends, build habits and engage in classroom and extra-curricular activities. All these add to and shape their overall experience of education. For the most part, they navigate from what is given to them — a system, a place and a community of peers and trainers. Here are a few tips and experiments that you may want to try for that richer, educational experience:
Think of a problem that personally bothers you. Then, develop a plan to solve it. Think in the context of your programme. Write it as one of your class assignments, propose a solution and more importantly, go out and execute your proposal. Be prepared to fail, but do not get bogged down by it. Instead document the journey of your effort, its successes and its failures. Build your team and meet experts in the field. Interview them. Tell them the problem and the solution that you are envisioning. Collaborate with them. This whole experience will teach many things. Most importantly, it will help you become a doer, a contributor, and it will develop in you a sense of detail and habit of pragmatic approach of seeing a problem and fixing it.
Experiment with form and content
In other words, challenge yourself to engage with your curriculum (content) to produce a new form of knowledge. If you are a student of history and your assignment is to study the history of India’s Independence, go out and try to find people who have witnessed the happenings of India under British Raj. Film them and bring them to your class and have them co-present with you to your classmates and faculty. Play the footage, and ask everyone to react. See what happens. Then, take it to a next level.
These nudges will help you look far and beyond, listen better, observe more deeply and bring together varying perspectives. These will also help you consider and explore traveling and meeting new people and new places.
Finally, you will become more curious, more generous and more rigorous; in your thoughts, ideas and approach. You will be able to build teams easily and swiftly solve problems. These approaches will help you expand into new horizons, a skill which is deeply integral to a 21st century world, one which is so squeezed by the forces of globalisation and heavily rooted in the idea of global citizenry.
The world must find and see a global citizen in Indian youth who is Made in India.
These tips will do exactly that.
— The writer is a Ford scholar and international education specialist
Learn to embrace changes and celebrate them in ways that are not commonly presented to us in day-to-day pedagogy.
Collaborate and learn to learn from failure, and put yourself together under stressing and contradictory circumstances and feel at home with yourself.
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