My experience is mostly for Oxbridge and for Maths/Computer Science (and that's what I'm going to assume for the following tips), but the lessons below apply to other universities and courses too - adapt them to your personal taste and needs.
Elvek
A 2018-as magyarországi választásokon én a következő elvek alapján szavazok:
- Ha a Fidesznek többsége lesz, akkor folytatódik a horror.
- Tehát az egyetlen remény, hogy a Fidesznek nem lesz többsége. Akkor is bőven lehet katasztrófa, de a remény csak ezen az úton van.
- Ezért a szavazataimat úgy fogom leadni, hogy maximalizáljam az ellenzék mandátumait.
The same article in Hungarian: http://agondolkodasorome.hu/fb/danka-miklos-egyetemvalasztas-maskent/
As always, what I describe is my mental model, and not “a universal truth”. There are implicit exceptions to everything I write. You can benefit most from it by open-mindedly considering my points and incorporating them into your mental model.
In a recent discussion with a young person who was facing a university choice I realised that our regular assessments are oriented around less important aspects.
Discussions around universities tend to be dominated by subject quality: which university is the best at teaching a given subject? For heavily knowledge-based subjects like Medicine, this might make sense. But for others - like Maths, Computer Science, Social Sciences, and so on - it does not.
This post is written with students of the Computer Science Tripos at the University of Cambridge as the audience, but almost all of the principles apply to other standard memorisation-based examinations as well.
Despite being an awful tool, you’ll have to deal with exams (see David MacKay’s “Everybody Should Get an A” for a better system). I don’t judge you based on how you think of exams or your performance - this is because I don’t think how you think about exams reflects values that are good or bad: there are legitimate reasons for both. But if you do care about exam performance - like I did at university - then this post is for you. I was top of the exam papers of the Computer Science Tripos at the University of Cambridge all three years not because of specific skills, but because of figuring out the right strategies.
We can’t all be top of the years, but you can significantly improve your result compared to others by leveraging the below principles. The catch? It’s difficult.
Exams are a game. Here is the winning strategy.
The below are my interviewing principles aimed at intermediate-level people who conduct standalone job interviews.
The first interview I've ever conducted was at Palantir, 2.5 years ago (at the end of 2012). An interviewer dropped out and there were only the 15 of us in Europe at the time - so I had a whopping 10 minutes to prepare for an interview for a different role than mine. It was seemingly a disaster - the interviewee was several levels above me intellectually at the time and owned the interview. 140 interviews later, I don’t think that it was a disaster anymore (although naturally one of my weakest interviews). My goal was to find the truth about his technical abilities - and I accomplished just that. We hired him and now he’s one of the strongest execution people in the European business.
What follows is a set of interviewing principles which apply to all roles. The role-specific parts of interviewing are signal collection and the hiring decision and these are outside of the scope of this discussion.