Day 21 — Wrapping up the exam prep and practicing data collection
Today was another busy day. Not only did I revise all the exam readings multiple times, but I also had an important meeting where I tested the approach to empirical data collection.
On the exam prep, I’m still not nailing it 100%, but I’m able to recall content pretty well from all of the readings. Sometimes some parts of key points are somehow beyond the reach of my memory, but I’m already quite happy with my learnings.
I remember that long time ago I didn’t want to prepare much for the exams, because I thought that this would result in temporary improvement in my capabilities and wouldn’t reflect my true state of knowledge. Later, I realize that exams are not important at all. They are just triggers or deadlines that help me dive deeper into the content and develop deeper insight and understanding. Now I know that, if I learn a lot of things by preparing to the exam, I have succeeded. Exam might still show some things I didn’t learn well. The grade is not really important. It’s long-term learning that matters.
One more thing on the revisions. Since I had quite a lot of content, sometimes I was taking breaks and doing other things between the revision and recalling sessions. This gave my brain a break and time to forget. This is extremely important. Because, in order to learn I have to be able to recall things from deeper memory. So to learn, I have to forget first. (But before that I have to learn, of course).
On the empirical side, I’ve missed one batch of companies already, but there will be more soon. So we practiced the data collection process with people involved (not the companies though). It was quite insightful. The current system for recording of events wasn’t very robust. It was, at times, hard to figure out what were the plans and what were the actual activities. There were missing dates. All in all, this exercise helped us improve the process for data collection and already showed interesting difference in the approach companies took, when dealing with new technology implementation (trials).
