A Helpful Academia Exercise for Software Engineers?
What if I told you there’s one mental exercise from academia that I believe is actually helpful for an industry-working Software Engineer?
Experiencing this exercise quite frequently during my graduate studies made me feel I improved in these abilities:
- Critical thinking
- Organizing a plan
- Considering trade-offs
- Answering questions with the famed “it depends” answers 😂 (no joke though)
So what’s this whatchamacallit that did the trick? The answer is doing academic research. Hear me out…
The Brain Gym: Academic Research
After combing through hundreds of papers during my studies, I realized the act of criticizing, analyzing lots of papers, and comparing differing opinions is like doing a gym session for the brain.
Here’s an example of my research for finding my thesis idea where I collected around 80 papers from the latest Software Engineering publications: My Research Example
Why is Research Demanding?
But why is this research task so demanding? There’s actually research that offers a reasonable explanation for this: it involves “Higher-order skills that require deeper learning and a greater degree of cognitive processing compared to lower-order skills” (see source 1, source 2).
Bloom’s Taxonomy orders mental tasks into several levels. The task of finding a research gap and formulating a novel idea obviously has a lot to do with, or even mostly deals with, the upper levels of this ordering.
Having become accustomed to performing higher levels of mental tasks should make us more competent at doing the lower-level ones.
How do you think the mental tasks of working as a Software Engineer align with these cognitive levels? I’d love to hear your thoughts 😁
Key Takeaway
What’s the key takeaway here? Should you take a graduate degree as an SE? Nope, I discussed that in my previous post here: On Graduate Degrees for SEs.
Instead, I think we should strive to always improve our cognitive abilities by doing high-order mental tasks where possible. This should make us more proficient at doing our daily SE work.
Even better is to double down on SE tasks that require a higher order of thinking, so you’ll hit two birds with one stone.
That’s it! I hope the post was helpful, see you on the next one 👋