There are lots of different ways to stimulate your mind and learn. In college, there is so much information out there. All of it is being thrown your way. In theory, most of it will stick. And TADA, you learn.
That approach works for most concepts. You learn to become a better problem solver, time manager, and more responsible person.
A gap I’ve found, though, in school is the lack of discussions/conversations about current, interesting content.
There are clubs that are really formalized and perhaps you talk about certain topics in them. But for me, what I wanted, was just an opportunity to sit down with a bunch of diverse, really intelligent people and just talk about the future.
So that is what I started doing. It’s super informal. And it happens late at night.
“Jam Sessions.”
It started by me inviting like 10 of my friends. Like 5 of them showed up. And they were all pretty much computer science students. We talked about the future of self driving cars, automation, and more. And it lasted about an hour. People really liked it ~ and I learned a ton from really interesting people.
But there was an issue with this first “discussion”:
- most of the people in the room were “technologists.” Meaning there was a clear bias towards the world of technology. Hence, we probably overestimated a ton of things.
So for the next discussion. I made sure to try and balance the field. This time, I invited a few people that I knew…but also asked people I never have talked to before or had a friend invite them. The idea being to get a more diverse group to talk.
This, again, went really well. So we kept on going. We talked about the future of CRISPR one week, the next we spoke about education policy.
My favorite conversation was about the way we consume information and how that is likely to change in the next 5 – 20 years.
Now that the semester is over, I have been thinking about what I should do with this group of people. Do I “formalize” it? Do I turn it into a podcast? Do I make it an actual club?
I’m leaning towards not making it a club. The informal aspect makes it great. But I do want to find a way to preserve this audio / content / discussion. I do not think anyone would really listen to this podcast ~ but if we could find a way to have tangible takeaways from what we learn or write blog posts…something will stick!
We could even do these via google hangouts. And invite in a broader set of people.
Anyways, it’s super fun! Hope to continue this.