Success
Why You Should Job Shadow
The other day, someone asked me if I could write an article on shadowing. While I don’t have any real advice for finding mentors to shadow besides “just asking”, I remembered an article I wrote a few years ago about my experience shadowing a physician, and why I thought job shadowing as a whole [...]
Why You Need to Think Critically about Advice and Who You Get it From
Sometimes I read advice online for medical school admissions from medical students that I think is fundamentally wrong. Of course this would seem counter-intuitive – how could someone be wrong about advice if they got in?
Consider a game of rock, paper, scissors (yah yah, how many times have I used this example now?). [...]
Understanding Expectation and Avoiding Being Results Oriented
I have always done well in school my whole life. Throughout both elementary and high school, I had rarely gotten close to a failing grade in anything. And even the few times I did, the weight of those assignments or tests was not that significant, and as you eventually learn, high school marks [...]
The Secret to Consistent Success – Part 3: Adaptation and Innovation
As you learned in the first two parts of this series on success, my first Independent Study Project (ISP) for my gifted program was on the Brain and Nervous System, and I was able to achieve success by mimicking a technique I had observed from older students. However, the following year in Grade 6, [...]
The Secret to Consistent Success – Part 2: Resourcefulness and Mimicking Success
To better explain what I mean by this title, let’s go back to the story in Part 1 of this series. As I was saying, the Grade 5 gifted students were not expected to achieve the higher objectives in their projects, such as synthesis. In the end, I was one of a few [...]
The Secret to Consistent Success – Part 1: Not Knowing How To Succeed
At the elementary school Gifted program I attended for four years, one of the most important and time-consuming activities every year was the Independent Study Project (ISP). The ISP consisted of picking any topic of interest, and using all of the Bloom’s Taxonomy cognitive objectives as guidelines for understanding, thinking, and communicating about the [...]
It’s Okay to Look Like an Idiot
When I was in Grade 4, I was identified as “gifted” by my school board. As a result of that, I started going to a separate gifted program at another school for one day a week from Grades 5 to 8. It was a great program that allowed me to explore many neat [...]
The Power of Marketing: Because Perception is Reality
“What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”
This is a famous quote from the character Morpheus of one of my favourite movies of all time, The Matrix. [...]
Managing Risk
Some people have a poor understanding of risk. Much of the public tends to look at risk only in an absolute sense. They call certain activities “risky” and other activities “not risky”. As such, people tend to completely avoid “risky” activities at all costs while preferring activities they consider “safe”.
According to many [...]
Scholarship Aftermath: Dealing with Loss and Disappointment
I was talking with a friend last night whose recent scholarship interview has left her a bit upset and frustrated at the moment. She felt like she did great, and that she deserved to move on to the next round of the process, but ultimately, she was not selected.
If you’ve read my article on [...]
