I like learning. It gives me a sense of progress, it makes me feel alive and the exposure to new information and to new fields ignites my creativity. There are also those moments when I suddenly understand something that I get a surge of dopamine and I feel a rush of excitement.
Thankfully, I find myself in a job where learning is the requirement, as the field of AI is rapidly evolving. I can’t complain about that or if I were to complain, I’d rather say it is too much to keep up to. But it’s a challenge I’m willing to embrace.
However, there are plenty of things outside of work that I still want to learn. And after finishing my studies, I came to realise there are far less incentives and reminders to learn. Sure, I am glad there are no dreaded exams or mid-semester quizzes, but along with that, the intense peer study sessions and the focus groups for tackling challenging assignments are also gone.
While I did not fully recreate that feeling or environment, one rule that helped me continue learning as an adult was splitting my year into quarters. Every quarter, I’d pick a subject I would focus on and I would set some clear milestones and goals (tests and final exams).
To illustrate, in the previous quarter I focused on nutrition. I took a course (the theory part), I learnt more than 10 new recipes (the lab part) and I implemented a weekly routine of meal planning to save time and food waste and operationalise the whole process (that, I don’t know how to parallel to school, the metaphor has its limits).
It is not the first nutrition quarter I did, nor it will be the last. Like in school, there are multiple grades and levels, and I still have some mandatory curriculum to cover.
However, this approach gave me the structure I needed in order to regain a sense of progress and focus in my learning. And I am not the only one. Rachel Wu, associate professor of psychology at the University of California Riverside, encourages using the traditional academic year as a guideline to learning beyond university.
So if you try it, let me know your grades how it went!