Love To Learn

Thank you. So it was during the first semester of my senior year when my friend Stefan introduced me to this cool new website he found called edX, For those of you who don't know, edX is a website, is an organization started by MIT, UC, Berkeley, and Harvard, and what they do is they offer college courses online for free. My first semester of senior year, I was busying myself with managing clubs, being a part of ASB and doing my college essays, and so I, being a brilliant guy that I am, took four of these edX classes my first semester of senior year. Since then, I've taken over 20 classes from sites I've learned how to program a Pac-Man that learns from his mistakes. I've learned how quant Along the way, I've also learned a couple of things about myself. I've learned that I love to learn. Of course I did, because I wouldn't have survived first semester of senior year otherwise. I love being able to take a concept and internalize it and let it change the way I perceive the world around me. I also realized that for the first time in my life, I had took responsibility for my own learning. If I didn't understand a concept, I had to be the one to identify and go back and relearn and get understanding. Here's a quick question. Show of hands, how many of Awesome. That's great. Good teachers make you more interested in a subject because they make it applicable to your life. Another question. How many of I see more hands. That's a shame. If there is anything constant in this world, it's adversity. No matter where you go and no matter what you do, there will always seem to be someone or something opposing you. That's out there. That's constant. But what's variable isn't what's in here. How you handle that adversity. How you react to it. I've had my own share of good and bad teachers, but what really changed learning for me is realizing that I don't have to be negatively influenced by the bad ones. Eventually, there won't be anyone to teach you, but you will never have to stop learning. Don't let a learning moment pass you by. Make the most out of every minute by trying to learn something from it. I bet you that you will find lessons to be found in the least obvious of places at the least obvious of times. Learn from other people as well. Surround yourself with people that are better than you and something you want to be good at. This is definitely not limited to academics. I want to be more compassionate. I surround myself with people that I admire for their empathy. This is my friend Ruthwijk. We had a class together in the morning. I would learn something cool from edX. I would go to class next day and I would be This is amazing. I would show him the algorithm that I learned the night before. I love doing this because every single time he would be That's incredible. It was so rewarding and so much fun. Last Friday, I was taking a final. It was a pretty hard question. I figured it out eventually. Then it dawned on me that the answer to this question was the exact same algorithm I taught Ruthwijk the year before. Instead of looking I discovered an interesting relationship between learning and teaching. Learning is something you have to do every day. It'selfish if you don't share that knowledge with other people. You should let teaching be a part of your daily lifestyle as well. I bet that you'll discover that teaching is extremely difficult. Do I talk too fast when I teach? Do I talk too slow when I teach? Do I become easily frustrated? These are things that you'll notice about yourself that you wouldn't notice otherwise. You'll also find that learning is extremely rewarding. Now is your chance to be that great teacher for someone else. You can be that positive influence in someone else's life by being patient, by being a teacher, by explaining your reasoning. TEDx celebrates the power of the individual, how each of us has a power to change the world around us. I think we can also all agree that the problems we face today in the world are much too large to be faced to be fought by any one man alone. Poverty, global warming, war. Now more than ever, we need to draw upon the resources and the knowledge of the people around us to make this world a better place. And that means that we need you to be effective. Every day is so precious, and it is important that you make the most out of every single day you have. That's hard, you see, and I agree. It'super hard. But Learn a little, teach a little, live a little. Thank you. Thank you.