Different Think.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in the May 1st, 2012 issue of The Observer.

One of the absolutely worst quotes of all time is “college is the best years of your life.” Every college student on the planet rolls their eyes because it’s something the grown-up folk love to pass around like it’s phenomenal counsel. It’s just a terrible expression. Right off the bat, it indirectly reminds us that life doesn’t get any better after college. Immediately afterwards, it instantly puts us students in this emotional indebtedness, like we need to owe reverence towards an experience that we’ve yet to have.

As a graduating senior here at Notre Dame, rich with the experiences of our campus, it’s my duty to take the reigns of our forefathers and join the monotony of alumni banter. However, I refuse to tell you that college is the best years of your life. For your sake, I hope it’s not.

We can’t settle with this four-year experience as being the most dynamic, exciting periods of our lives, because it means our aggressive risk-taking and belligerent socializing meant nothing for our future. Our adult lives cannot become torpid shadows of our four-year lifestyle, where passions from college fade away by the rhythmic droning of mediocrity. We can’t settle for alumni dinners as our only reminder of a life in which we fully lived.

While college shouldn’t be the best years of our lives, it is arguably the most important years of our lives. It’s an environment that’s so unlike anything else in life. Here, we’re forced to understand everything about ourselves. We discover how we learn, the ways we think and the philosophies that make us tick. College is a place where, for the first time ever, we are truly accountable to ourselves. There are thousands of moments that each of us experience here — both beautiful and tragic ­— where success is measured not by the quality of the journey, but by actually having these experiences. To celebrate the gift of life, we must be willing to experience everything that comes with it.

There are so many things I’ve learned from my time here at Notre Dame. Instead of taking up more newspaper real estate, I’m going to share the top nine rules that I learned from college. It’s my sincere hope that these will help the most important years of your life become legendary.

Rule No. 1: Don’t be logical about your major. Follow your passions and pursue something that you love to do. The worst thing you can do with your parent’s hard-earned money is to invest it in something that you’re not passionate about because it looks employable. Don’t ever sacrifice intellectual satisfaction in the name of job uncertainty.

Rule No. 2: Don’t let schooling get in the way of your education. If I had listened to my professors, I’d be an A student and completely unhappy. Instead, I’ve learned far more than my courses have allowed and love life, because I spent time learning rather than mastering intricacies of an antiquating school system. You can’t teach how to be passionate in a class curriculum. Don’t expect to learn it there.

Rule No. 3: Manage your homework and your course load incredibly well. The amount of things you have on your plate will never subside, ever. Develop the tools now to tackle the things that get in the way of living.

Rule No. 4: Don’t waste all of your time partying. Don’t get me wrong; I love the rage. But, there’s far more to life than getting drunk when it’s accessible. Grab a camera, get on a bike and experience, even if it means doing it alone.

Rule No. 5: This comes from a Wall Street Journal Article (“10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You,” April 28): “Your parents don’t want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn’t always the same thing.” Despite what you’d like to believe, your parents might be purposefully limiting you. With so much risk in the world, can you blame them? To settle for a riskless, safe life is to settle for a life not lived.

Rule No. 6: Contrary to what we’re taught, the most powerful word in the dictionary is not yes, but rather, no. Focus is an unbelievably valuable commodity. To have the discipline and strength to turn down exciting opportunities is something that will make your life more fulfilling and less scattered.

Rule No. 7: Most of life’s problems can be solved with good sleep, waking up early and eating breakfast. The Denver Omelet is the gold standard of this lesson.

Rule # 8: Discover what it is that you live for. Everyone has it. If you haven’t found it, you haven’t tried hard enough to find it. And when you find it, you’ll know. Take time to find it, because nobody else will. Nor will they give you permission to do so.

Rule No. 9: Do crazy things and believe in something. When you’re 65 years old, you’re not going to care about how well you played the rules. What you’re going to care about is how you stood up for an idea, a movement, something that resonates with you and that you’re better because of it. One of the greatest things in the world is to truly own your own beliefs.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in the April 3rd, 2012 issue of The Observer. 

Over the past four years here at Notre Dame, I’ve found myself spread thinly between multiple classes and mastering none of them. I’d begin semesters compelled to genuinely dive deep into my curricula, but would become inundated with an intense workload impossible to champion. We’re urged to eliminate the distractions of our lives — the likes of socializing, extracurriculars, and the passions that make us who we are — in order to rebalance ourselves around academia. However, the biggest obstacle in the way of genuine learning is simply school itself.

This semester, I found myself fed up with the typical tempo of an education system that is far too inefficient. Instead of business as usual, I sought to completely rework how I consume my education, becoming a test dummy in an experiment that would challenge how education is fostered. I believed that I could complete my entire academic semester in less than one month. And I succeeded.

Here’s how I did it:

Almost every class I’ve taken has been fundamentally rooted by textbook readings. That is, textbook chapters are the foundations of assignments and lesson plans, which then become the underpinnings of projects, papers and exams. Ipso facto, the textbook defines the class. I broke down all of the deliverables for each of my classes into their overarching categories — reading, assignments, projects, exam prep, etc. — and organized them together by category in order of their due date.

By prioritizing class deliverables according to how material is consumed, I could effectively complete a class in less than one week. I attacked each class one at a time, beginning with every reading assignment for that class and working my way to the next category. It would take about a day and a half to finish each category, and under a week to finish an entire semester’s worth of class deliverables. Then wash, rinse and repeat for the next classes.

The benefits of this kind of system are astronomical. By completing assignments in order — instead of highly scattered and intertwined around unrelated tasks throughout the year — we gain the benefits of contextual recall and focused learning. As most textbook chapters are built off one another, a clean read without stagnation makes for a more effective understanding of progressive concepts. Similar assignments call for similar actions, and consolidating them together reduces the total completion time by a major fraction. And instead of quickly forgetting material, this system actually reinforces content throughout each category, as well within class discussions, where content is no longer freshly new but reiterative.

It seems like all of this makes sense, but as you probably guessed, its execution is a nightmare. Classes have definitive due dates for deliverables, and there’s little time to fit a program like this into a normal schedule of classes. To complete a class in less than a week is to operate within a 12-hour workday that is simply impossible to maintain ordinarily. A student must make a major tradeoff between academic efficiency and punctual participation, and there’s no question that participation factors and submission deadlines dissuade many from even trying something like this.

So what did I do? I chose the classes with the smallest participation component attached to the final grade, with the fewest deadlines in the initial month, and with all deliverables and deadlines outlined for the semester. I then spent the first two weeks of school locked away in my room, working from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day for what was the most intensive academic session of my life. In that time, I had managed to complete a total of three classes for the entire semester, a feat that still amazes me.

After spending those two weeks knocking out half of my semester deliverables from sunup to sundown, I returned back to class and organized my assignments around class periods. I found that my time wasn’t scattered between three classes a night per usual; instead, I was able to devote my focus to the major projects and class assignments for my remaining classes. I was able to finish the rest of my assignments for the entire semester in less than a month.

What’s the ultimate takeaway of all of this? While I’m certainly not urging you to commit to this system, what I am suggesting is that we must become better consumers of our own education. I’ve completed my deliverables and prepared for exams and for the first time in my life, I’m also mastering it all. It’s a win-win scenario in which my schedule and academic enlightenment is infinitely more governable. But this luxury doesn’t come freely.

We can’t continue to blindly accept rules of a system where courses are engineered irrespective of how we learn. And if we wish to continue having faith in the university system, we can’t simply deprioritize everything else important in our lives en lieu of University demands. Instead, we must be willing to make tradeoffs and challenge our “that’s the way it is” attitude towards academia. Simply put, an education in which success comes at the expense of the passions and opportunities in our lives is simply no education at all.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in the February 28th, 2012 issue of The Observer. This takes a change of pace from the traditionally tech-oriented posts, and focuses on my relationships with my parents with graduation ahead of me. 

We get up on our feet, look ahead in front of us and take a giant leap forward in our lives. Slip on shoes, tie the laces, walk forward. It's such a simple daily ritual that we don't even think about it, but the ways in which we move in the world tell a compelling story of how we grow as people.

And grow I did. When my feet were small and bare, you once watched me sprint from room to room and trip and fall every few feet. What seems like seconds later, you watched as my feet kicked in excitement as you laced on my first pair of Power Ranger school shoes. Just a few moments later, you helped buckle my first pair of inline skates, knowing full well that I would come back with scrapes and bruises everywhere.

But let's not kid ourselves here. The son that you recognize today throws on non-matching socks, shoves his feet into winter boots and moves into a full-on sprint through the quad to get to class on time. And yet, other days, you'll find me stepping barefoot over empty beer cans, road signs that definitely weren't stolen and other things that aren't exactly scholarly.

The journey of our lives has taken all of us to so many different places. But this journey is mixed with just as many somber realities as it is with happy memoirs, a balance of life that you know all too well. If you look closely, the dress shoes in my closet are faintly marked with tears, having borne the weight of a boy who inexplicably found himself walking to a friend's funeral just a year ago. Those same dress shoes are scuffed up in frustration and doubt, abraded by truths of life that a son discovers when taking giant leaps and landing on rejection.

The journey of our lives leads us through both dark ditches and lighted highways, where the end result is a well-worn yet well-prepared set of feet. And good, bad or indifferent, these feet are growing much bigger, moving much faster and strolling much farther away than for what you're ready. In just a few months, my shoes will be laced by a black graduation gown and will take slow, confident strides towards a podium right before leaping into the air. What seem to be only minutes later, all of the shoes that I own will be thrown into cheap cardboard boxes with the words "New home" etched on it, adorned with a shipping address unfamiliar.

You'll soon find me strolling around in a strange new city not known for its safe neighborhoods, walking with coworkers whose names you'll never quite remember. And you'll meet a pair of Stilettos that seem to match perfectly with my shoes, with one of the heels gracefully lifted up in the air during a kiss in true Hollywood fashion. The pitter-patter of my Power Ranger shoes running at you seems but a distant memory, a moment in time that is all-too-quickly replaced by a stroll that is confident, collected and accompanied.

The truth of the matter is that everything is about to be very different for all of us. These are the realities of life, where the words "graduation," "career" and "dating" are concepts that suddenly have real weight to them. There will be moments when you won't be able to be there in ways you once were, when most of life's problems were solved with a mother's touch, a soothing voice and a giant hug.

But no matter how different post-graduation life may be, there is one reality that will always stay the same: How we choose to handle life is very much like how we handle our shoes. We can choose to run away in times of trepidation, trip on ourselves in the process and move forward with clumsy, limited strides. Or, we can lace up those shoes, tie them tightly and walk forward with confidence. Even though we may still trip and fall anyway, it isn't the shoes themselves that define the journey; it's the other pairs of shoes that walk alongside us, pick us up and make the journey something worth treading.

Luckily for me, there has always been a pair of shoes walking next to me the entire time. No matter how many times I've fallen, there has always been one person who was right there to pick me up and dust me off. And no matter how difficult the upcoming path will be, there will always be one person to whom I'll look for help. Even though our individual paths will soon diverge faster than you wish, with one of them far more exciting than the other, I will forever look to my side and feel solace that your pair will be right next to mine.

Each day, we get up on our feet, look ahead in front of us and take a giant leap forward in our lives.

And leap I will.

Thank you for always being there for me. I couldn't have made it this far without you.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in the December 7th, 2011 issue of The Observer.

We may have been fooled by one of our generation's biggest scams. In fact, not only do we blindly accept it, but most of us will be working our way out of debt for a decade because of it. It's a system that penalizes creativity, scatters our focus thinly between unrelated errands and unashamedly conditions us to believe that a few people can tell us how smart we are. 

The scam I'm talking about is college. On the surface, college inhales untrained minds and churns out well-respected mid-level managers, galvanized by proud relatives and anticipative parents looking to reshape adequate parenting into something employable. The stuff of dreams. But the reality is that college might be a waste of time and energy. And what's worse is that we idealize this experience as the final frontier for a better, happier, more creative life.

Rest assured I absolutely love Notre Dame. I love my curriculum, I enjoy my major and I adore my professors. But I absolutely hate, abhor and despise school.

For the past four years of our lives, we've lived in a system where genuine learning takes a back seat and most of our energies are spent figuring out what efforts yield the best grades. We spend each weekday traveling to multiple classes, sitting in lectures, reading unrelated textbooks and then we complete assignments and prepare for exams in scattered bursts. Students can barely remember what last month's tests were on, but can accurately tell you what words teachers circle when awarding A's or if exams are built around practice tests for courses taken two semesters ago. Somewhere in between, we sleep, eat, make friends, do resume-boosting extracurriculars, figure out who we are and try to have fun. Instead of a four-year experience where we master our majors, what we get is 48 months of moderately-managed cramming split between heavy drinking and applying for stepping-stone internships. College isn't so much a learning environment as it is a highly-fragmented to-do list. 

And, while the education experience is up to students, the actual practices and learning points reinforced are completely out of our hands. We can learn all we want, but GPA is the end-all on how well we understand material and, subsequently, prepare around it. How we learn must conform around a pre-determined, intentionally limiting structure and someone must tell us exactly how well we know the material before moving on. I have zero say in just how much I "get" something because my success is evaluated around a rigid grading rubric cemented in 2006. And it's retention, not comprehension, that's evaluated on a percentage scale, like I'm some sort of battery with an exact percentage of knowledge accumulated. I can read multiple books about a subject, but if I didn't remember the exact name of the cat involved in American court case from 1799 about property taxes for an exam, it's pretty clear that I didn't master the material. It's the Pavlov's Dog psychology experiment, where students are conditioned to memorize bolded words and last paragraphs of assignments in order to prove material competence to someone else. 

Of course, it's easy to be sarcastic about college. It's such a multifaceted institution that any pissed-off student can list off arguments against it. We may not remember all of the details from every lesson plan, but we are retaining far more than we'd like to believe. College is a place where students experience different subjects, build terabytes of genuine knowledge and discover academic passions. We mature socially and emotionally, thanks to the countless roommate, dining hall and inter-class social situations that occur at any particular moment. To throw away the value of a college degree is to disregard the thousands of subtle skills and philosophies that transformed the high school graduate we no longer recognize in ourselves.

But these benefits cannot completely justify a system where creativity and genuine learning isn't properly rewarded. And in the real world, its creativity and independent thinking that separates the Steve Jobs, the Alexander Flemmings and the Adam Smiths from the rest of the pack and actually drive the world forward. Unfortunately for us, college has no objective way to reward our out-of-classroom learning, and more often than not, punishes us for pursuing it. Every day, we face a complex trade-off between the major philosophies of how we consume our education. And each time we choose to master an exam rather than a concept, we slowly subdue our inner brilliance in lieu of a well-prepared recall of class deliverables. But, the more we commit ourselves to college, the more stimuli we must manage, and it's not easy to write off a cram session in the name of true learning when you're scoring A's and making parents proud.

Is college really a scam? Most likely, no. But, if we entered college with the intention of leaving as creative leaders, we shouldn't be so quick to take our practices and ranking accolades to heart. Maybe, just maybe, the college system isn't as perfect as we'd like to believe. Maybe, just maybe, we've been learning the entirely wrong lessons.

Editor's note: This article was originally published (and heavily over-edited) in the November 16th, 2011 issue of The Observer. 

One sleepless night a few weeks ago, I found myself checking my iPhone every 20 minutes, searching for articles on Twitter that could captivate me while I waited for my brain to turn off. As I thumbed through Twitter, I stumbled across an "Economist" article that pissed me off and made me laugh at the same time.

That Tuesday morning, a random blogger called my social and intellectual being into question. An article titled "Researchers are looking seriously at #Twitter" headlined across my iPhone, a 45-character phrase that reiterates what uncomfortably-nostalgic old people and self-dubbed Neo-Luddists think about them MyFacebooks and addicting Internets. I retweeted the post and began reading through the article. Skimming the article, phrases like "Twitter is degrading the English language" and "Our ease with some words is being diluted" were illuminated in front of me, and I sat there laughing and doubting it all. I skimmed to the bottom, scrolled to the top to reread the byline and then began reading the article for the first time.

As a student of the Y-Generation and an active inhabitant of the Twittersphere, in principle I am a dynamite representative of Twitter users whose reading and writing habits are adversely compromised. I found dozens of articles and blogs that talk about how Twitter — the social network that lets you write messages with up to 140 characters — is corroding our syntax and vocabulary with record acceleration. With Twitter's 140-character limit, users are called to write in compressed sentences and adopt unique language conventions, and somehow because of this, our language is quickly and noticeably worsening. This all sounds like it comes right out of the short story "Flowers for Algernon," where the protagonist's intelligence increases but then quickly deteriorates; all the while, the reader watches these changes take place in the form of the main character's increasing, but then quickly deteriorating, writing quality.

One of the first noticeable things about Twitter is the sentence structure and word quality behind each post. "The Economist" article began by commenting that modern language "is being eroded" due to "a world of truncated sentences, sound bites and Twitter." Because of that 140-character limit, many authors claim that sentences are shorter and words are less complex. Think eliminating colorful adjectives and adverbs, multi-syllable words and non-staccatic sentences in order to free up precious authorship space. "The Economist" source claims that how we express ourselves and use words is being diluted: the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.

Many also claim that the Twitter conventions are destroying the subtleties of human conversation. The use of hashtags (#) was initially employed in Twitter to denote a "Trending Topic" which, when first placed before unspaced words, "helps Twitter and its users understand what is happening in the world." Right now, #HottestPeopleOnTwitter and #ILoveHipHop are two Trending Topics which, in theory, should help you understand what's happening in the world. And, not only are hashtags wildly used, but the hashtagging convention has evolved as a means through which people preface jokes online. This most likely makes absolutely zero sense to anyone over 25 or for someone not on Twitter (#SorryImNotSorry). But using a "#" followed by unspaced words has somehow become a way users make jokes or express sarcasm, much the same way that different vocal pitches may denote different expressions.

Sentence minimalism comes not just in the form of collapsed words and smaller sentence sizes, but as SMS slang and shorthand notation. The condensing of Laughing Out Loud, writing of "RT" (to denote another Twitter user's quote) and emoticons in and of themselves are just a few examples of conventions that are supposedly destroying conversations outside of the World Wide Web. Combined with a heavy use of bulleted text, our language theoretically should be in shambles.

LOL. As an avid Twitter user, this all strikes me as fear grounded by sci-fi novels (1984 FTW) or among those afraid of the #RebeccaBlackEffect. To RT @mat from Gizmodo, “new technologies change the way we think and interact” but does not mean that we've “lost something as a society.” To think that GenY is in risk of becoming 1 sentence, 2 syllble writers who use “#s” to make funny jokes gives 0 credit to any of us users.

Even worse is the idea that Twitter norms are moving into offline convo, like Twitter styles may replace real dilog: (http://nyti.ms/vJa8sW). Thinking that tech affects our grammar, social skills, or even sleep cycle for that matter is fiction only Flowers For Algernon could rival. To ignore words that are > than 2 syllbles or limit a sentence to < than 140 char long is to ignore the complex beauty of language itself. The bottom line: Twitter may constrain language, but we will *never* let a service downgrade language richness & define our use of wording. That’s a #failwhale in and of itself, and would be caught well be4 it started to affect what big words we select or how we compact writings.

#Winning.