Deep thinking and working hard

The article called "How to become a deep thinker at college" really caught my eye because that is what we have been talking about in this class and my critical thinking class. We have been discussing how to think deeper about a particular topic or idea and to analyze it and give our own ideas and meaning of what we read. The advice I got from the article was that becoming a deep thinker requires 3 steps; One, to chose a mixture of courses that all seem interesting to you, two, calculate the number of hours per week you will need to handle the workload for these courses, and three, then double this total and keep that number of hours free in your schedule. The author of this piece seems to think that you need lots of time and can't be rushing from one activity to another all the time. Becoming a deeper thinker is a process and you need to do all the right strategies to get there.

           I somewhat agree with this, but part of me also disagrees. I agree that choosing a mixture of courses that are interesting to you is important and can help you be more engaged in your courses, but I disagree with the part that says you need a lot of extra time. When I think of being a deep thinker I think being busy and being involved in different things actually helps because it gives you many different ways to look at things and be engaged. Having too much time I feel can be bad and cause a student to become lazy or only do the bare minimum for the work they need to complete. For example, being on a sports team could make a student want to work harder and become more involved so that they can continue to be on the team and participate.

        The second article that caught my eye was one that somewhat goes along with the deep thinking article called "Work hard or work smart". There is a big difference between working hard and working smart. Working hard is really applying yourself and working hard whereas working smart is normally just working to find an easy way to get your work done faster. You need to have a healthy balance of the two and don't just do one. Working smart= making a plan, making a plan can help you schedule the time you need to work hard. This goal of working hard can be applied to any area of life. I connected to this article because being in college now I really do feel as though I need to make schedules and plan out my time more carefully than I had to in high school.