Learning is like a deck of cards, spilled all over the ground. Some are facing up, some are facing down, and there is no easy way to pick them up and get them back in order. It looks like total chaos. But then you take a deep breath and start picking them up, one by one, making order out of disorder.
I felt like this at the beginning of my graduate studies at Northwestern. I felt like I was lost - picking up little tidbits of information and theories that I learned in class, but it still seemed like disorder. I knew I was learning “stuff” - like picking up one card at a time from the spilled deck of cards - but I didn’t quite understand how I was going to make it all fit together.
As I continued on with my studies, I felt as if I was not only picking up more cards, but making sense of the cards I already had. I started to move them around in my hands - making patterns and connections in new ways. I realized that I could take these cards and sort them by suit, by number, or by color. I realized that there was not one single way to sort and make sense of the information I was learning in the program - there were multiple ways and multiple applications. Some was theory, some was case study, some were definitions, some were tools… some I agreed with and liked a lot, some I did not.
As I continue building my “deck of cards” in my graduate program, I am learning that eventually it will fit together in an organized manner that made sense and builds upon itself. Each individual class, each individual reading or paper, it starts to form a whole body of knowledge. If needed, I could even (like a deck of cards) shift things around and organize by a different method for different applications in my professional life.
