November 13, 2004
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Lifelong Learning
No matter how old you are, there are always "tests." I thought that after high school and the SAT and ACT, I'd be done with tests. But then there were college exams, and then the GRE, and the MCAT. And now I'm doing the USMLEs. And then there's Board exams. And people warn me of Continuing Education exams.
One thing I've found, through all these exams, is that they may or may not have any relevance at all to what I'm taking the tests to achieve!
But they are hoops I jump through, nonetheless.
In addition to these bubble-tests, I generally like to teach myself other things which only require that I challenge myself.
One of our faculty recently gave a lecture about learning styles based on personality types. He is somewhat correct when he describes my learning style based on my personality type. So, I post the basic premise here, in case it may help someone else who may be struggling in the learning department.
His suggestions:
1. Find your personality type, based on the Myer-Briggs test. This is actually an exam that should be "administered by a professional," but for my purposes, I used this free test here.
2. He had suggestions for how different personality types learn best. I agree with him in that, as you get older, you may have already trained yourself to learn using a method opposite to your natural type. For this reason, some learning may exhaust you, because it takes effort to use a style that is opposite to your own natural style of learning.
3. His biggest suggestion is to learn "concept mapping" because according to his personal experience counseling medical students, all personality types can benefit from learning in this way (although it may be very tiring to some personality types). I believe the theory behind concept mapping is that one is actively organizing information in a way very similar to how the brain stores it. In other words, you are creating a neural network, very similar to how you want to store it in your brain, such that it is easily retrievable.
To all who have upcoming midterms, break a leg!
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