Since I’ve added a second major and separate minor during my undergraduate journey, I’ve had so many opportunities to better understand the connections between subjects by asking questions.
Since my freshman year, I’d heard upperclassmen stress the same advice: go to office hours. Like most freshmen, I found it intimidating to ask a professor questions I didn’t see worthy of their time. Instead, I resorted to pestering the graduate student instructors (GSIs), or TAs, during their office hours.
During my first year, I usually only went to office hours to ask about guidelines for assignments and evaluate outlines. However, I got into the habit of going to the office hours after my assignment had been graded: bringing a revision or ideas on how to make the next assignment more aligned with the learning goals of the course. Asking to go over specific parts of my assignments has paid off at times. Twice, my instructor adjusted my assignment grade a few points after re-reading my original assignment with the guidelines in mind.
As I moved away from asking logistical and assignment revision questions, I debated whether I should ask my dumb questions that weren’t closely related to what we covered in class. I assessed two phrases that I’d heard before, which were meant to encourage students not to fear asking questions:
- Every question is a good question: I knew this wasn’t true since I could remember times when I asked a question and realized how bad a question was as soon as I finished saying it.
- There’s no such thing as a dumb question: Maybe some questions weren’t dumb in their content, but in their purpose, considering whether it was a question that wastes time or could have been answered by paying attention beforehand.
I did believe that there wasn’t such a thing as dumb questions in terms of content, since questions did always look for additional information. I added something to the phrase and one of my life mantras was born:
As long as you’re looking for an answer, there’s no such thing as a dumb question.
My top tips:
- Bring revisions of assignments (even if it’s a paragraph) printed out with the original content to a reader/TA/graduate student instructor.
- Don’t shy away from connecting content from different classes/courses/majors because professors love to apply their knowledge outside of what they teach.
- Ask about additional context of the content covered in class.
- My go-to sentence starter for asking professors about content outside of the class is: “I had less questions today, I was hoping to have more of a conversation.”
- Remember questions are for clarity! It’s better to have clarity than hesitation.