This is exactly my point! A well-rounded education brings in the best of both worlds and allows everyone to share their specific knowledge in contributing towards improvement!

Thanks carriekilleen for your great comment. I agree with you that regularly check may not be the only solution. I also mention this fact that learning to do our job on time. As I said in my post also, kids need to learn a new approach to life from their early of their education. As far as we look at our life as a sprint and care only to outcome, no checks can solve procrastination problem and my point in blog is not to give them a step-by-step roadmap to do their job. I think we need a system to teach us using our time effectively and change our approach to life. If this has happened, I think procrastination problem will be solved in most cases.

Thanks for sharing your story Willie! Education should be fun and serve a purpose for the learner. It takes a lot of courage to do what you did and I think that you certainly have an interesting perspective on education because of your experiences.

Thanks for the post! While the joy of learning and discovery has prodded me to stay in school yet another few years for my PhD, I am DEFINITELY excited about summer break, breaks in general, and not working. Call me a hedonist, but I do great things with leisure time and, if left to my own devices, I would never leave summer break. With that testimony aside, I do not find it that surprising that students hate going to school and/or forget their goals coming to college. While I agree with you that part of the problem stems from boring classes that don’t make you think, lectures gone horribly wrong, etc., I also think a big part of the problem is that many people do not feel like they have a choice in whether or not they go to college. Society and their parents expect them to go to college, and they are seen as low-class or a failure if they do not. Thus, most students probably do not have any sort of goal in mind when the come to college…they don’t have to, they just know that they have to go. They are only interested in the final outcome, because having a degree is all they know they are supposed to get out of college. So, I guess I think that students are, in effect, forced to go to college. I think that part of the solution is allowing students to actually assess what their goals actually are and also promoting other options aside from traditional four-year universities.

Thanks for the post! In several classes I have taken that involve a final project or research paper, the professor had us turn in either an outline, first draft, annotated bibliography, etc., partway through the semester, with the intent of preventing procrastination disasters. I always liked that extra nudge to get me at least thinking about my project. However, I am not sure about assigning more frequent project updates, reports, or other “checks” to make sure the students are still doing what they are supposed to do. For one, the students may still procrastinate, in that they do the reports the night before they are due and, while they may not be procrastinating on the project, they are still procrastinating. On a similar note, and people are different, but I told my advisor I did not want to have weekly or regularly scheduled meetings with him to go over my dissertation research–for me, progress doesn’t really go at regularly-scheduled intervals, so some weeks I have nothing to say, other weeks I might accomplish quite a lot. And, while I agree that education should value the learning process over the final outcome, students need to learn to be adults and manage their time effectively, so I am not sure if giving them a step-by-step roadmap to success (in the sense of weekly reminders that they should be working on their projects) is always the best idea.

Thanks for your post! I attended an R1 university (University of Georgia) for my undergraduate and Master’s degrees, and even though UGA is definitely not a small, liberal arts college, I felt like I received a fairly liberal-arts-esque education because I double-majored in a B.A. and B.S. Even though I now focus on the more science-y hydrology, all of my time spent in Spanish literature classes has done me lots of good, especially when it comes to writing and crafting an argument, which is also really important in science. Since I’ve been at Virginia Tech, I’ve already audited one Spanish class and hope to audit another one next year to keep up my language skills, but also because I enjoy discussing the portrayal of gender and power in nineteenth-century Cuban poetry. A well-rounded education is possible at STEM or R1 universities, especially with the minor, double-major, and certificate options available.