Becoming a Master Student 16th Edition

Book Preface

Children are great students. They quickly master complex skills like language, and they have fun doing it. For young children, learning is a high-energy process that involves experimentation, discovery, and sometimes broken dishes. Then comes school. Drill and drudgery can replace discovery and dish breaking. Learning may become a drag. Use this book to reverse that process. Rediscover what you knew as a child—that joy and learning go hand in hand. Becoming a master student is about gaining knowledge and skills by unleashing the natural learner within you.

This book is full of suggestions for doing that. Every chapter is packed with tips, techniques, methods, tools, and processes for you to play with.

Sometimes people feel overwhelmed by this fact. “There are more ideas in here than I could ever use this term—or even during the rest of my education,” they say. Exactly. That’s the whole point. And there are several reasons for this.

One is that Becoming a Master Student is designed for long-term use. You’ll find enough ideas to play with for years beyond graduation—for the rest of your life, in fact. There are also many suggestions here because some of them may work well for you and others might not. Consider note-taking methods, for example. Some students rave about mind mapping—a visual way of recording ideas. Other students find mind mapping too messy and swear by traditional outlines instead. This book offers detailed instructions for both methods—and many more. Feel free to play with all of them, combine them, modify them, and invent new methods of your own.

That’s the biggest reason for the density of ideas in this book. Underlying every paragraph and every page is an invitation to actively experiment with the content. Find out what truly works for you.

People who excel in any field are experimenters. They’re willing to consider many options—even the ones that sound crazy at first. When faced with a new idea, their first reaction is not to say: That will never work. Instead, they ask: How might that work? Then they take action to find out. It took hundreds of people to produce Becoming a Master Student. Besides the author, there were editors, designers, proofreaders, and advisors. Beyond them were hundreds of educators and students who contributed everything from a single comment to the inspiration for entire chapters.

The true author of this book, however, is you. Your responses to any suggestion can lead you to think new thoughts, say new things, and do what you never believed you could do. If you’re willing to experiment with new ways of learning, the possibilities are endless. This process is more fundamental and more powerful than any individual tool or technique you’ll ever read about.

Consider the possibility that you can create the life of your dreams. There are people who scoff at this idea, and they have a perspective that is widely shared. Please set it aside. The process of experimenting with your life is sheer joy, and it never ends.
Begin now