The Rose cafe with Dr. Cynthia Hill revolved around how to get the most of the feedback you get from professors.

One topic Dr. Hill focused on was that getting feedback should be treated as the start of a conversation. Even if it the final draft of a paper, the feedback can help guide you when you are writing the next paper in the class. I can relate this to an experience I had in a philosophy class I took earlier in my Cornell career. I remember writing a paper that relied too strongly on economic arguments, and not on the topics we discussed in class. I was trying to shove too many lens into one paper. One mistake people make is taking criticism to mean that they just have to shape the paper more to professor’s liking just because that’s what he/she like. I think this is the wrong mindset to have. The professor has a lot of years of experience in the field, and he/she is trying to help acquaint you with that field. In my case, I focused more on making my philosophical arguments stronger in the next paper. This, of course, helped my grade, but even I could see that it was a much better paper than the jumbled one I handed in before.

The conversation did make me miss having classes outside computer science and math which I have primarily taken these past 2 semesters. There really isn’t the same opportunity for a conversation regarding a project. In particular, the comp sci department is so overfilled that having an ongoing conversation with a professor is much tougher. In general though, the feedback cycle lends its to the liberal sciences more than STEM, at least at the undergrad level.

Even still, I do get feedback from TAs in my computer science classes, especially when I do something wrong. Like Dr. Hill emphasized, it is important to really study that feedback. The TAs usually identify a weak point you have in the material. It is important to address these weak points instead of letting them pile up and failing your exam.